Abstract
Black carbon (BC) particles were removed from experimental flue gas by the surfactant solutions of sodium dodecylbenzene sulfonate (SDBS), hexadecyl trimethyl ammonium bromide (CTAB), fatty alcohol polyoxyethylene ether-9 (AEO-9) and polyoxy ethrlene nonyl phinyl ether-10 (TX-10), as well as AEO-9-SDBS, AEO-9-CTAB and SDBS-CTAB, in a new type of umbrella plate scrubber. Among the four independent surfactants, AEO-9 has the lowest surface tension, 35.9 mN/m, which resulted in the highest BC removal ratio among the alone surfactants. The experimental conditions were as follows: dust concentration=3000 mg/ m
3
; gas velocity=14 m/ s; liquid-gas ratio=0.80 l/ m
3
; and gas flow=400 m
3
/h. When the mole ratio of the mixed surfactants was 1:1, the lowest surface tension could be detected among the studied mixed surfactants. According to the molecular interaction parameters (β) and the mole ratio of surfactant 1 in the mixture (x
1
), the synergistic effects of AEO-9-SDBS and SDBS-CTAB solutions were obviously higher than those of AEO-9-TX-10 and AEO-9-CTAB. Therefore, AEO-9-SDBS solution had the lowest surface tension among the mixtures due to its β<0 and x
1
=0.85. The mixture solution of AEO-9-SDBS (1:1 mole ratio, 0.2 mmol/l) yielded the highest BC removal ratio, about 99.8%, and it was about 12% higher than that of only water, which was about 87.9%. The calculated critical micelle concentration was almost the same as that of the experimental concentration when the related equation was corrected by β.