Kinetic studies of elemental mercury adsorption in activated carbon fixed bed reactor

From the kinetic studies results it was observed that all the examined models describes efficiently Hg0 breakthrough curves, from breakpoint up to equilibrium time. The most accurate prediction of the experimental data was achieved by second order model, indicating that the chemisorption rate seems to be the controlling step in the procedure. However, the successful attempt to describe mercury uptake with Fick's diffusion model and the first order kinetic model, reveals that the adsorption mechanism studied was complex and followed both surface adsorption and particle diffusion.