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 Hg0 physically adsorbed
on the surface. The physical adsorption of Hg0 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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