Removing and recovering mercury from off-gases of thermal treatment processes
- ADA Technologies, Englewood, CO (United States)
ADA Technologies is developing a sorbent-based process that recovers mercury from off-gases produced during the thermal treatment of wastes found in the DOE complex. This process regenerates the sorbent on-line and recovers liquid, elemental mercury either for ultimate disposal if radioactivity is present or for commercial distillation and re-use if no radioactivity is present. Because of these attributes of the process, ADA Technologies has adopted the name Mercu-RE to describe its process. The authors have completed proof-of-principle field tests of this technology and are currently gathering engineering design data for scaling up the process. In both the field tests and laboratory tests, the process removes over 99% of the mercury from flue gases at temperatures up to 350 F and with up to 10% water vapor and 200 ppm HCl. The sorbent has always been regenerable, and the authors have tested up to 124 cycles of sorption and desorption with no loss of sorption capacity. Several physical configurations of the sorbent are possible including a packed bed of sorbent beads, sorbent incorporated on the fibers of a filter bag, and sorbent coating the inside walls of a monolith. For the off gas of thermal treatment units in the DOE environment, the best sorbent configuration is the packed bed. The authors have examined the durability of the sorbent by constantly exposing it to the regeneration temperature of 700 F and found that some sorbent formulations are unstable at these conditions while others are stable. In addition, a 50 ACFM skid is undergoing testing at MSE Technology Applications (Butte, MT) to determine the scale-up rules that will allow the process to be implemented on an operating thermal treatment unit.
- OSTI ID:
- 679328
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-980632-; TRN: IM9940%%148
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: 91. annual meeting and exhibition of the Air and Waste Management Association, San Diego, CA (United States), 14-18 Jun 1998; Other Information: PBD: 1998; Related Information: Is Part Of Proceedings of the 91. annual meeting and exhibition. Bridging international boundaries: Clean production for environmental stewardship; PB: [5000] p.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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