The emission of sulfur dioxide in flue gases is an important problem in industry involving combustion of coal The wet scrubbing process using lime/limestone slurry as the scrubbing medium is currently the dominant technology for the flue gas desulfurization Due to the presence of numerous ionic and neutral species in the slurry, the chemical reactions involved in the slurry upon absorption of sulfur dioxide are complex In this paper, a method of measuring the sulfur dioxide absorption in multi-component suspensions was developed and the characteristics of sulfur dioxide absorption were investigated The results show that different additives chosed in the experiment can improve the ability of SO2 absorption As to the same additive, the improvement effect is differ with different concentration For the magnesium hydroxide additive, its optimum concentration is 1×10 -4*#mol/L Experiment results suggested that dissolved sulfur dioxide reacts mainly with the magnesium sulfite ion pair which is responsible for the increased absorption rate of SO2 However, when CO 2-3 or SO 2-4 anions are present in the solution, the catalytic effect of magnesium hydroxide precipitate on sulfur dioxide absorption reduces According to the experiments, absorbents with better performance can be optimized to be applied in semi-dry or wet FGD process to raise SO2 removal
