Gas-phase elemental mercury removal by nano-ceramic material

Abstract

The nano-ceramic which is mesoporous silica material was applied to test the removal efficiency of gas-phase Hg0 using a fixed-bed reactor. The physical and chemical properties of nano-ceramic were investigated by various techniques such as BET surface area (BET), X-ray diffraction, fourier transform infrared spectrometer (FTIR), and scanning electron microscope (SEM); then, the sample was tested for mercury adsorption under different conditions. The mercury adsorption tests shown that different Hg0 concentration, adsorption temperature, gas flow rate, and different gas components have significant effects on the mercury removal performance of nano-ceramic, and the adsorption removal rate of nano-ceramic can be 75.58% under the optimal experimental conditions. After fitting the experimental data to the adsorption model, it was found that the theoretical maximum mercury adsorption amount qmax of nano-ceramic is 1.61 mg g−1 and there were physical and chemical adsorption at the same time. The adsorption kinetics fitting results shown that the adsorption process of nano-ceramic exhibits multi-segment characteristics of “transmembrane–diffusion–adsorption.”