Abstract. ZnO sorbents with different CeO 2 loadings were prepared by microwave calcination and tested the performance for H 2 S removal in a fixed-bed reactor at 500 . The results r ℃ evealed that the Ce-doped sorbents have a higher efficiency and longer breakthrough time compared with non-modified sorbents. The optimal sulfur capacity (13.03 gS/100 g) and breakthrough time (17.5 h) were obtained when the content of CeO 2 up to 4 wt.%. XRD, SEM, XPS and mercury porosimetry methods were used to characterize the structure of sorbents. Analysis data indicated that the addition of CeO 2 leads to better pore structure and larger specific surface, which facilitates the diffusion of H 2 S into the active sites. Furthermore, the presence of CeO 2 also results in an increase in the content of surface elements including Zn and O, which contributes to improve the ability of H 2 S removal.
IntroductionThe integrated coal gasification combined cycle (IGCC) process is considered as one of the promising clean coal technologies in the 21st century [1][2][3], meanwhile the high temperature gas desulfurization (HTGD) was regarded as one of the key techniques in the IGCC system [2][3][4][5][6][7]. The oxides of Zn, Fe, Ca, Mn and Co as H 2 S sorbents for HTGD are investigated extensively nowadays [7][8][9][10][11][12][13].Among these sorbents, Zinc oxide sorbents are considered to be the most promising material for HTGD because of its large sulfur capacity and excellent desulfurization thermodynamics [7,14,15]. Up to now, many synthesis methods have been investigated [16][17][18][19][20]. In comparison with traditional preparation methods, microwave irradiation is a burgeoning method to prepare desulfurizer by virtue of it can provide a rapid drying and evenly heating [21]. The advantages of microwave heating over conventional heating have been studied in our previous work [22].But under the condition of high temperature, the ZnO sorbents would evaporate thus limit its development [7,23]. Moreover, single ZnO sorbents show many disadvantages such as decrease of sorbent efficiency and degradation of the mechanical properties [24]. In order to improve the performance, ZnO sorbents mixed with many metal oxides have been evaluated [24][25][26][27]. CeO 2 as one of the most promising rare earths has an outstanding oxygen storage capacity and improve the performance of ZnO sorbents for desulfurization [11,[28][29][30].In this paper, the performance of ZnO based sorbents doped with various content of CeO 2 employed for high temperature coal gas desulfurization were studied. Also, the effects of the amount of CeO 2 loaded to the sorbents on the performance for H 2 S removal were studied. The analysis data of structure and textural properties were provided by XRD, XPS, SEM and mercury porosimetry.