Coal preparation
As explained above, during the formation of coal and subsequent geologic activities, a coal seam may acquire mineral matter, veins of clay, bands of rock, and igneous intrusions. In addition, during the process of mining, a portion of the roof and floor material may be taken along with the coal seam in order to create adequate working height for the equipment and miners. Therefore, run-of-mine (ROM) coal—the coal that comes directly from a mine—has impurities associated with it. The buyer, on the other hand, may demand certain specifications depending on the intended use of the coal, whether for utility combustion, carbonization, liquefaction, or gasification. In very simple terms, the process of converting ROM coal into marketable products is called coal preparation.
Levels of cleaning
Coal preparation results in at least two product streams, the clean coal product and the reject. Generally, five levels of preparation can be identified, each being an incremental level of cleaning over the previous one:
Level 0:
At this level, no coal cleaning is done; ROM coal is shipped directly to the customer.
Level 1:
ROM coal is crushed to below a maximum size; undesirable constituents such as tramp iron, timber, and perhaps strong rocks are removed; the product is commonly called raw coal.
Level 2:
The product from level 1 is sized into two products: coarse coal (larger than 12.5 millimetres) and fine coal (less than 12.5 millimetres); the coarse coal is cleaned to remove impurities; the fine coal is added to the cleaned coarse coal or marketed as a separate product.
Level 3:
Raw coal of less than 12.5 millimetres is sized into two products: an intermediate product (larger than 0.5 millimetre) and a product smaller than 0.5 millimetre; the intermediate product is cleaned to remove impurities; the smaller product is added to the cleaned intermediate product or marketed separately.
Level 4:
Cleaning is extended to material less than 0.5 millimetre in size.
Preparation steps
In the early days of coal preparation, the objective was to provide a product of uniform size and to reduce the content of inert rock materials in ROM coal. Reduction of impurities increased the heating value of the cleaned product, reduced deposits left on the furnace, reduced the load on the particle-removal system, and increased the overall operating performance of the furnace. Today, air-pollution regulations require that ROM coal be cleaned not only of ash and rocks but of sulfur as well. The processing of raw coals at levels 2, 3, and 4 therefore requires a maximized recovery of several characteristics (e.g., ash content, heating value, and sulfur content) in the respective product streams (i.e., clean coal and the reject). Four steps need to be considered: characterization, liberation, separation, and disposition.
Characterization
Characterization is the systematic examination of ROM coal in order to understand fully the characteristics of the feed to the preparation plant. Washability studies are performed to determine how much coal can be produced at a given size and specific gravity and at a particular level of cleaning. The studies provide a basis for selecting the washing equipment and preparation-plant circuitry.
Liberation
Liberation is the creation of individual particles that are more homogeneous in their composition as either coal or impurities. (In practice, middlings, or particles containing both coal and impurities, are also produced.) Liberation is achieved by size reduction of the ROM coal. It is a level-1 process, the product of which is the input to a level-2 plant. In general, the finer the ROM coal is crushed, the greater the liberation of impurities. However, the costs of preparation increase nonlinearly with decreasing desired size.
Separation
In the separation step, the liberated particles are classified into the appropriate groups of coal, impurities, and middlings. Since impurities are generally heavier than middlings and middlings heavier than coal, the methods most commonly used to separate the input stream into the three product streams are based on gravity concentration. Relying on differences in the two physical properties of size and specific gravity, equipment such as jigs, heavy-media baths, washing tables, spirals, and cyclones separate the heterogeneous feed into clean, homogeneous coal and waste products. For extremely fine coal, a process called flotation achieves this purpose. (A schematic diagram of a flotation separation cell is shown in the.)
Disposition
Disposition is the handling of the products of a preparation plant. The entire plant process includes ROM storage, raw coal storage, crusher house, screening plants, various slurries (coal-water mixtures), dewatering system, thickeners, thermal dryer, process-water systems, clean-coal storage, clean-coal load-out system, monitoring and process-control system, and refuse-disposal system. Occupational health and safety hazards as well as environmental problems are associated with each of these processes. Detailed planning and designing can eliminate the worst problems of noise, dust, and visual blight and can also significantly reduce adverse impacts on air, water, and land.