Adsorption Performance of Elemental Mercury Sorbents from Simulated Natural Gas through Copper Sulfide Supported Alumina

Natural gas, petrochemical and some refinery feed streams have trace of mercury which threats the environment and human health. Moreover, brazed aluminum heat exchangers are susceptible to corrosive attack by this component. This study discusses adsorption performance of elemental mercury sorbents from simulated natural gas (SNG) by copper sulfide pported active alumina. All sorbents were characterized through XRD, BET, TEM, XRF, LECO carbon/sulfide analyzer. The simulated natural gas creates by evaporating the liquid mercury contained in a thermostat glass saturator at temperature of 60oC into a stream of pure nitrogen. These sorbents were loaded in a fixed-bed reactor and sulfided with a nitrogen gas containing 8 % mol of H2S at the temperature of 285oC overnight. Then, the effect of sorbent samples for removing mercury was tested at the temperature of 60oC, pressure of 1atm and SNG flowrate of 220 cm3/min, and in several steps in terms of time the results were reported. The characterization results of suitable sorbent showed its meso pore is higher and capacity is larger than other sorbent. Experiments have showed the suitable sorbent removed approximately 19 percent of mercury exist in SNG with respect to sorbent's weight.