Mercury emissions monitor draws crowds in Edinburgh

Gasmet unveiled a new continuous mercury monitoring system (CMM) at Mercury 2013 in Edinburgh, Scotland, during the ‘International Conference on Mercury as a Global Pollutant’. Expressing his delight with the number of enquiries received, Gasmet Europe’s Antti Heikkilä said: “With delegates from over 50 countries, the conference was extremely well attended and our booth received a constant stream of enquiries throughout the week.

“We received requests for monitoring applications covering mercury emissions in coal and waste incineration, to emerging measurement requirements such as mercury in natural gas and other forthcoming regulatory driven applications.

“Most of the visitors to our booth were looking for a monitor with low detection limits, no interferences and with low operating costs, so the CMM was ideal for their needs.”

The Gasmet CMM employs cold vapour atomic fluorescence (CVAF) to deliver very low detection limits at a significantly lower cost than other comparable mercury monitoring instruments.

The CVAF spectrometer has an integrated high temperature converter to effectively transform mercury compounds to atomic mercury without any chemicals or vulnerable catalyst materials. The close coupling of converter and fluorescence cell also ensures that Mercury does not recombine to, for example, Mercury Chloride between the converter and the Mercury Analyser. Sample gas dilution with synthetic nitrogen generated within the CMM system is an effective tool to promote sample transportation whilst decreasing the loss of Hg0 fluorescence signal to interactions with O2, CO2, and H2O. The fluorescence cell is specially designed to eliminate stray reflections and background light so that even with sample dilution the CMM system is capable of monitoring low levels of mercury as required in the forthcoming US Clean Air Mercury Rule.

The system is controlled through a touch screen control panel, which is integrated with the analyser and calibrator inside an air-conditioned cabinet, and calibration is maintained with regular automatic zero and span calibrations using Hg0 and HgCl2 calibration gases generated within the CMM system - typically every
24 hours. Periodic linearity checks with atomic mercury or mercury chloride are also possible.