How does a scrubber help in reducing the formation of acid rain ?
Scrubbers help to remove most of the sulfur oxides from the smoke stack exhaust of a power plant. .Then it enters a scrubber. In the scrubber, there is a water spray that produces a cloud of fine water droplets. The water is mixed with crushed limestone, which reacts with the sulfur and pulls it out of the exhaust.
Scrubbersare an apparatus that cleans the gases passing through the smokestack of a coal-burning power plant. Due to Clean air act regulations, most scrubbers in coal plants are used to remove sulfur emissions from coal and lessen the formation of acid rain. In this use, scrubbers are large towers in which aqueous mixtures of lime or limestone absorbers are sprayed through the emissions, known as flue gases, exiting a coal boiler. The lime/limestone absorbs some of the sulfur from the flue gas.The advantage of scrubbers is that sulfur emissions are lower than in standard coal plants, but the plants are more complex and require more maintenance.