Experimental study reveals rapid elemental mercury capture by iron-containing sphalerite at room temperature, indicating an effective approach for indoor spill remediation.
The indoor concentration of mercury is often higher than the reference concentration due to the historic accidents with mercury-containing devices. Therefore, there is a great demand to develop a treatment for the accidental breakage of the devices containing liquid mercury. In this work, Fe-containing sphalerite was developed as a cost-effective sorbent for the in situ emergency disposal of liquid mercury leakage. Fe-containing sphalerite showed an excellent performance for elemental mercury capture at room temperature, with the capacity of much greater than 8.65 mg g –1 and the reaction rate of 4.82 μg g –1 min –1 . The formed Hg species on Fe-containing sphalerite was HgS, so it was thermally stable at room temperature, poor leachable and low toxicity to microorganism. The chemical adsorption of elemental mercury on Fe-containing sphalerite mainly followed the Mars–Maessen mechanism and approximately followed a pseudo-zero-order kinetic reaction. The reaction rate of elemental mercury with Fe-containing sphalerite mainly depended on the concentration of Hg 0 physically adsorbed on the surface. The physical adsorption of Hg 0 on sphalerite was remarkably promoted after the incorporation of Fe, which may be mainly related to the presence of cation vacancies on Fe-containing sphalerite.
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Liao et al. (2016) studied this question.
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