Removal of elemental mercury by activated carbon impregnated with CeO2

Mercury emission from coal-fired power plants becomes a great environmental concern due to its high toxicity and volatility in particularly for elemental mercury. Activated carbon adsorption is considered to be a potential technology to control elemental mercury emission. In this work, a novel CeO2/AC (activated carbon impregnated with cerium dioxide) sorbent was studied with an attempt to produce economical and effective sorbent for capturing mercury. The influencing factors researched include loading values changing from 1 wt% to 10 wt% and adsorption temperature changing from 30 to 200 °C. Some physicochemical techniques such as BET and XRD were used to characterize the properties of the sorbents. The adsorption test results show that CeO2 impregnation significantly enhanced the AC adsorption ability for elemental mercury. When the CeO2 load was below 3%, Hg0 adsorption ability of ameliorated AC enhanced with the increase in the loading value, and then decreased at higher loading. The influence of temperature on the mercury removal efficiency was also studied, the trend of which was similar to the effect of loading value. The maximum removal efficiency was obtained at 100 °C.