Effective Removal of Mercury Ions in Aqueous Solutions: A Review

Abstract

Background: Due to its high toxicity and bioaccumulation, the existence of mercury in the environment is always a big threat to human beings. In order to control mercury pollution, scientists have put great efforts in the past decades. Methods: Precipitation, adsorption, membrane separation, biological treatment and ion exchange are reviewed as a remover for mercury removal. For each material type, we not only reported on the removal mechanism, but also discussed the best areas for it. The correlation method and step-to-step focusing method have been used for references. Conclusion: With the exploration and application of research, people have mastered a variety of mature technologies for the treatment of mercury-containing wastewater. Using inexpensive adsorbents is a cost-effective method for treating low concentrations of heavy metal wastewater. Ion exchange with a fast removal rate has been widely used in the field of heavy metal removal from wastewater. The biological treatment method can effectively treat low-concentration mercurycontaining wastewater. However, there is still a need to develop novel mercury removers with high capacity, fast removal rate, and low removal limit. Nanomaterials with a high specific surface area on substrate with synergistic effects, such as high adsorption and ion exchange, are the future research points.

Removal of mercury from polluted water by a novel composite of polymer carbon nanofiber: kinetic, isotherm, and thermodynamic studies

“…These techniques include adsorption, ion exchange, reverse osmosis, membrane separation, liquid-liquid extraction, precipitation, electrodeposition, and precipitation. 14,15 However, from the engineering point of view, the cost and efficiency of the used technique should be compromised.…”

Modern nanobiotechnologies for efficient detection and remediation of mercury

“…AuNPs have high electrical conductivity and a high affinity for metals such as Hg, As and Pb (Yang et al, 2019). A lot of researchers have published on Hg 21 removal with AuNPs (Chen et al, 2017a(Chen et al, , 2017bHu et al, 2019;Hua et al, 2020). AuNPs work as electrodes with proteins, amino acids, DNA or some other materials (Herrero et al, 2001;Karimi-Maleh et al, 2019).…”

Removal of mercury(II) from aqueous solution by partially reduced graphene oxide

“…Among all these techniques, adsorption holds great promise due to the simplicity, high adsorption rate, non-secondary treatment step, and relatively low-cost technology 12 – 14 . A variety of conventional adsorbents have been proposed for removing Hg(II) from contaminated waters, namely, activated carbons 15 , zeolites 16 , resins 17 , mesoporous silica 18 , mesoporous carbons 19 , and clays 20 . However, these adsorbents have presented low adsorption capacity and weak binding affinity for Hg(II) ions.…”