Outstanding Performance of Recyclable Amorphous MoS Supported on TiO for Capturing High Concentrations of Gaseous Elemental Mercury: Mechanism, Kinetics, and Application.

Hg capture by sorbents was a promising technology to control Hg emission from coal-fired power plants and smelters. However, the design of a high performance sorbent and the predicting of the extent of Hg adsorption were both extremely limited due to the lack of adsorption kinetics and structure-activity relationship. In this work, the adsorption kinetics of gaseous Hg onto MoS/TiO was investigated and kinetic parameters were obtained by fitting breakthrough curves. According to the kinetic parameters, the removal efficiency, the adsorption rate and the capacity for Hg capture were accurately predicted. Meanwhile, the structure-activity relationship of metal sulfides for gaseous Hg adsorption was built. The chemical adsorption rate of gaseous Hg was found to mainly depend on the amount of surface adsorption sites available for the physical adsorption of Hg, the amount of surface S available for Hg oxidation and gaseous Hg concentration. As MoS/TiO showed a superior performance for capturing high concentrations of Hg due to the large number of surface adsorption sites for the physical adsorption of gaseous Hg, it has promising applications in recovering Hg from smelting flue gas.