Dry Cleaning of fine coal using a Fluidized bed shaking table: Dr. B.K. Parekh

Coal currently contributes approximately 29% to the world’s total primary energy consumption. Coal is also of particular interest for liquifaction and gasification. Despite the environmentalist concern, it is anticipated that the world’s coal consumption in coming years will increase significantly. Coal preparation has been practiced for more than a century. Water being the work horse for cleaning coal. Even though all the water based technologies provides a satisfactory performance, dewatering of coal becomes a major hurdle for all the preparation plants. As such, dry coal cleaning of coal becomes more appealing. Low rank coal (LRC) supplies a significant amount of coal for power generation and ranks number one in coal producing states. The LRC coal being low in ash and sulfur is preferred by utilities, even though it contains high moisture and mercury. The LRC seams are modestly dipping. As such, the amount of overburden burden is increasing as mine production progresses. The increased depth of the overburden and seam has caused significant effort to be focused on ensuring stability of the high benches that are created in the extraction process. The second geologic factor is the increased presence of non-coal partings and, in some cases, a complete split in the seam. In addition to impacting the mining practice and increasing extraction cost, both factors increase the amount of coal that is contaminated by the rock in the partings and overburden and thus left in the pit as fill material due to the inability to meet market specifications. As such a significant amount of fine size ( minus 5 mm) coal is discarded, which amounts to a significant revenue loss for coal producers. The main objective of the proposed project is to evaluate a modified laboratory dry table machine for processing 5 x 1 mm size low rank coal. The project will evaluate various operating criteria using a statistically designed experiments to determine the grade and recovery of clean coal. The outcome of the project will enhance the potential to utilize finite coal resources more effectively.