Activated carbon innovation delivers smoother car suspension

Just as The Beatles wrote the best songs, it’s tempting to think that all of the elegantly simple engineering inventions are already spoken for, and that the next generation of innovations - hidden away beneath layers of technological complexity - are going to be altogether more difficult to winkle out.

Despite this, every now and again The Engineer hears about a technology that triggers a “why did no one think of this before?” moment. And a compelling new approach to automotive air suspension pioneered by UK materials firm Carbon Air is one such breakthrough.

The company’s technology - which was spun out of the University of Salford in 2011 - taps into the curious properties of activated carbon, a simple material currently used extensively for filtration in the water treatment and food industries.

One of the key attractions of activated carbon for these existing applications is its high degree of microporosity, which vastly increases its surface area and helps it to adsorb contaminants or - if you apply it to a suspension system - air molecules.