The effect of support on mercury capture performance of MnOx regenerable sorbents

Mercury is well known to cause adverse effects in human body and animals. Coal combustion on its own contributes to 30% of the global anthropogenic Hg emissions. Elemental mercury (Hg0) is the most difficult species to remove with conventional air pollution control devices due to its high volatility and insolubility in water. Oxides of transition metals (in particular Mn) have been recently indicated as possible alternatives to activated carbon as regenerable sorbents for Hg removal from combustion flue gas. Moreover MnOx based catalysts are widely studied for their high activity and selectivity for NOx reduction in flue gases via the low temperature (<200 °C) NH3-SCR reaction, which is a typical redox process. This observation opens the possibility of simultaneous SCR and mercury capture in a single process unit in tail-end configuration. Following previous studies in this work we set out to investigate the effect of the type of support (TiO2 vs. Al2O3) on the Hg0 removal performance of MnOx-based adsorbents under oxidizing conditions.