Overview
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 — drivers and interventions
- Supply-chain screening
- ICP-MS — Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry
- Fabric protectants (excluding waterproofing/flame-retardant per GS-48 boundaries)
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.
productsis 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.
Update history
The five most recent substantive edits to this page, classified major (evidence or structure moved), correction (a published value or statement was wrong and has been fixed), or minor (narrative rewritten without changing the underlying evidence). Each description is derived from what the edit did to this page; the linked commit is the authoritative record, routine regeneration passes are excluded, and 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.