Abstract
In the present work, the study and the performances of an adsorbent material for gaseous mercury employed in different diffusive bodies geometries is presented. The material is based on gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) deposited on quartz fibres filters, suitable for bonding the gaseous mercury through an amalgamation process. Following thermal desorption and analysis, the behavior of different diffusive samplers prototypes was compared. Both indoor and outdoor exposures were carried out in order to evaluate the advantages and shortcomings of the geometries in study at different sites. From the outdoor long-term exposures, a constant uptake rate (Ur), with a low influence coming from the environmental conditions, was observed for the axial geometry, reporting a high coefficient of determination (R2 0.97). Indoor exposures showed a higher reproducibility, along with a higher coefficient of determination (R2 0.99). The presented results allowed us to observe different behaviors coming from two kinds of diffusive samplers designs, showing different adsorption rates and data dispersion. This allowed us to focalize our attention on the most suitable design from these two tested prototypes, for this kind of adsorbent material.
Highlights
Among heavy metals, harmful for human health, mercury has gained more attention and study in the last years [1,2,3]
In this paper we report the results of a study regarding the development of a passive device for monitoring atmospheric total gaseous mercury (TGM) concentrations, based on gold nanoparticles [29], deposited on a quartz fibers support [30,31,32]
The use of the axial geometry, where the adsorbent material is placed orthogonally to the incoming flow, on the bottom of a cylinder opened from one side (Figure 4a) either of a radial
Summary
Harmful for human health, mercury has gained more attention and study in the last years [1,2,3]. (GEM), gaseous oxidized mercury, Hg(II) (GOM) and particulate bounded mercury (PBM) [4,5,6]. Gaseous elemental mercury (GEM), when present in its elemental state (Hg◦ ), can persist in the atmosphere over a period of time from several months to more than one year, before being oxidized and removed by dry or wet depositions. This long permanence of GEM in the atmosphere gives it the time to distribute homogeneously, leading to a globally mean concentration with small differences
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