Li et al. 2024 — Selenium-functionalized PPS fabric for Hg0 immobilization

Li and colleagues developed selenium-functionalized polyphenylene sulfide (Se/PPS-I) fabric as a biomimetic sorbent for elemental mercury removal from industrial flue gas. This is mitigation evidence, not consumer-product occurrence evidence: the reported values are adsorption-capacity, uptake-rate, breakthrough, and recovery endpoints for a remediation material. The paper is useful for the mercury-remediation dimension and for courses on supplier controls, exhaust treatment, and mercury capture technologies.

Key numbers

• Pristine PPS captured Hg0 with 12.1% accumulated adsorption efficiency within 120 min.
• Postsynthetic selenium-on-PPS increased Hg0 adsorption efficiency by 32.2% compared with pristine PPS, but the authors attributed its incomplete capture to sparse, patchy selenium sites.
• The optimized in situ Se/PPS-I design reached an Hg0 adsorption capacity of 1621.9 mg/g and an uptake rate of 1005.6 micrograms/g/min at operating temperatures above 100 °C.
• In a long-term fixed-bed test, outlet Hg0 stayed nearly undetected for more than 70 h at a specific gas flow rate of 1.13 m/min with inlet Hg0 at 1000 micrograms/m3.
• Capacity at 80% breakthrough was 1203.4 mg/g, with the same reported uptake rate of 1005.6 micrograms/g/min.
• The authors projected that coal-fired flue-gas Hg0 could be reduced from about 20 micrograms/m3 to below 1.7 micrograms/m3 for 9940 h at a real specific gas flow rate of 0.8 m/min.
• Spent Se/PPS-I could be thermally decomposed to recover approximately 87% of the captured mercury as liquid mercury; decomposition was set at 300 °C based on TPD results.

Methods (brief)

The team synthesized Se/PPS-I by loading selenite onto PPS fabric and reducing it with glutathione under alkaline conditions, then compared it with postsynthetic selenium-coated PPS, pristine PPS, selenium powder, and selenium-functionalized polyester. Hg0 adsorption was tested under controlled gas-flow conditions, with outlet Hg0 concentration, breakthrough, gas hourly space velocity, and flue-gas-interference scenarios evaluated. Characterization included ICP-MS for selenium content, SEM/EDX, XPS, XRD, TEM/HRTEM, BET surface area, contact-angle testing, and temperature-programmed decomposition. The mercury species studied is elemental mercury gas (Hg0), and the immobilized product was characterized as HgSe; this page does not substitute those data for methylmercury or food total-mercury occurrence.

Implications

Certification: Do not pool the adsorption capacities or inlet/outlet gas concentrations into any HMTc occurrence threshold. They are mitigation-performance endpoints from a sorbent system.

Courses: Strong example for mercury-remediation modules because it links material design to quantitative capture capacity, breakthrough performance, flue-gas interference resistance, and mercury recovery.

App: Can support context notes that mercury removal technologies may be relevant upstream of consumer-product supply chains, but the paper does not rank any consumer product as contaminated or clean.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• mercury
• remediation-evidence
• supply-chain-screening
• icp-ms
• fabric-protectants

Verification notes

• DOI, authors, year, and publication were taken from the Nature Communications PDF title page.
• The auto-fetch row labelled this as a fabric-protectants target; the actual study is a mercury-removal sorbent/filter-fabric paper. products is therefore left empty so the source is not treated as fabric-protectant occurrence evidence.
• The source reports Hg0 gas capture and HgSe immobilization; no methylmercury or consumer-product total-mercury concentration is inferred.

Page history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page. The full version history lives in git; when DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.