Overall Kinetics of Heterogeneous Elemental Mercury Reactions on TiO ₂ Sorbent Particles with UV Irradiation

The kinetics of gas-phase elemental mercury (Hg⁰) oxidation on titania particle surfaces in the presence of UV irradiation was established. Overall reaction orders with respect to the gas-phase mercury concentration (α) and the UV intensity (β) were found to be 1.4 ± 0.1 and 0.35 ± 0.05 for the differential bed reactor, whereas values of α and β were 1.1 ± 0.1 and 0.39 for the aerosol flow reactor (AFR). While the values are similar, the AFR results are more representative of the practical sorbent process. In the low-temperature range (<80°C), the overall rate of initial mercury uptake increased as the temperature increased, indicating that it was a reaction-controlled process. At higher temperatures (>110°C), an increase of the temperature resulted in a decrease of the overall reaction rate, indicating an adsorption-controlled process.