Recent research has shown that fly ash may catalyze the oxidation of elemental mercury and facilitate its removal. However, the nature of mercury-fly ash interaction is still unknown, and the mechanism of mercury retention in fly ash needs to be investigated more thoroughly. In this work, a fly ash from a coal-fired power plant is used to characterize the inorganic and organic constituents and then evaluate its mercury retention capacities. The as-received fly ash sample is mechanically sieved to obtain five size fractions. Their characteristics are examined by loss on ignition (LOI), scanning electron microscope (SEM), energy dispersive X-ray detector (EDX), X-ray diffraction (XRD), and Raman spectra. The results show that the unburned carbon (UBC) content and UBC structural ordering decrease with a decreasing particle size for the five ashes. The morphologies of different size fractions of as-received fly ash change from the glass microspheres to irregular shapes as the particle size increases, but there is no correlation between particle size and mineralogical compositions in each size fraction. The adsorption experimental studies show that the mercury-retention capacity of fly ash depends on the particle size, UBC, and the type of inorganic constituents. Mercury retention of the types of sp2 carbon is similar to that of sp3 carbon.
