Transition Metal sulfides (TMSs) are effective sorbents for entrapment of highly polluting thiophiles such as elemental mercury (Hg⁰). However, the application of these sorbents for mercury removal is stymied by their low accommodation capacities. Among the transition metal sulfides, only CuS has demonstrated industrially relevant accommodation capacity. The rest of the transition metal sulfides have 100-fold lower capacities than CuS. In this work, we overcome these limitations and develop a simple and scalable process to enhance Hg⁰ accommodation capacities of TMSs. We achieve this by introducing structural motifs in TMSs by in situ etching. We demonstrate that in situ acid etching produces TMSs with defective surface and pore structure. These structural motifs promote Hg⁰ surface adsorption and diffusion across the entire TMSs architecture. The process is highly versatile and the in situ etched transition metal sulfides show over 100-fold enhancement in their Hg⁰ accommodation capacities. The generality and the scalability of the process provides a framework to develop TMSs for a broad range of applications.

^{过渡金属硫化物 (TMS) 是有效的吸附剂，可用于捕获元素汞 (Hg 0} )等高污染性嗜硫菌。然而，这些吸附剂在除汞方面的应用因其低容纳能力而受到阻碍。在过渡金属硫化物中，只有 CuS 具有工业相关的容纳能力。其余过渡金属硫化物的容量比 CuS 低 100 倍。在这项工作中，我们克服了这些限制并开发了一个简单且可扩展的过程来增强TMS 的Hg ^{0容纳能力。}我们通过原位蚀刻在 TMS 中引入结构图案来实现这一点。我们证明原位酸蚀刻会产生表面和孔结构有缺陷的 TMS。这些结构基序促进 Hg整个 TMS 架构中的^{0表面吸附和扩散。}该工艺用途广泛，原位蚀刻的过渡金属硫化物的 Hg ⁰容纳能力提高了 100 多倍。该过程的通用性和可扩展性提供了一个框架来为广泛的应用程序开发 TMS。