NEW REAL-TIME ZEEMAN ATOMIC ABSORPTION CONTINUOUS MERCURY (HG) EMISSION MONITOR (Abstract)
Sholupov, S.1; Popov, A.1; Ryzhov, V.2; Pogarev, S.2; Markelov, M.3 and Siperstein, J.3
1 Lumex Ltd, St. Petersburg, Russia; 2 Earth Crust Research Institute, St. Petersburg State University, Russia;
3 OhioLumex Inc, Cleveland, OH, USA
A new real-time Zeeman atomic absorption continuous elemental mercury emission monitor (LumexCEM) has been developed. A distinguishing feature of the LumexCEM is that there are no chemicals in the analysis process. Stack gas comes to an exchange chamber where all water vapors and particles are removed from the flow and then the gas enters into the Zeeman mercury spectrometer RA-915+ (Lumex Ltd, Russia). The flow rates are 2-3 l/min. It was found out that the loss of the elemental mercury does not exceed 5% in the exchange chamber. Due to the use of the Zeeman background correction the interference of different impurities such as sulphur dioxide (SO2), nitric oxides (NOx), carbon oxide (CO) is eliminated. The LumexCEM is configured to a specific task. If stack gas is relatively pure (e.g. a scrubber is used in a technological line), it is possible to use a multipath analytical cell (with an equivalent length of 960 cm) and the detection limit is 0.05 mg/m3 with a response time of 40 sec. If stack gas is relatively dirty (e.g. stack gas of power stations or incinerators), and it contains various interfering impurities, then a small analytical cell of 6.8 cm length is used, the detection limit being 1mg/m3. Work is currently underway on a continuous total Mercury emission monitor with thermal decomposition of the Mercury species in flow.