Kinetic studies of elemental mercury adsorption in activated carbon fixed bed reactor.

Activated carbons are suitable materials for Hg(0) adsorption in fixed bed operation or in injection process. The fixed bed tests provide good indication of activated carbons effectiveness and service lives, which depend on the rates of Hg(0) adsorption. In order to correlate fixed bed properties and operation conditions, with their adsorptive capacity and saturation time, Hg(0) adsorption tests were realized in a bench-scale unit, consisted of F400 activated carbon fixed bed reactor. Hg(0) adsorption tests were conducted at 50 degrees C, under 0.1 and 0.35 ng/cm(3) Hg(0) initial concentrations and with carbon particle sizes ranging between 75-106 and 150-250 microm. Based on the experimental breakthrough data, kinetic studies were performed to investigate the mechanism of adsorption and the rate controlling steps. Kinetic models evaluated include the Fick's intraparticle diffusion equation, the pseudo-first order model, the pseudo-second order model and Elovich kinetic equation. The obtained experimental results revealed that the increase in particle size resulted in significant decrease of breakthrough time and mercury adsorptive capacity, due to the enhanced internal diffusion limitations and smaller external mass transfer coefficients. Additionally, higher initial mercury concentrations resulted in increased breakthrough time and mercury uptake. From the kinetic studies results it was observed that all the examined models describes efficiently Hg(0) breakthrough curves, from breakpoint up to equilibrium time. The most accurate prediction of the experimental data was achieved by second order model, indicating that the chemisorption rate seems to be the controlling step in the procedure. However, the successful attempt to describe mercury uptake with Fick's diffusion model and the first order kinetic model, reveals that the adsorption mechanism studied was complex and followed both surface adsorption and particle diffusion.