POC-SCALE TESTING OF A DRY TRIBOELECTROSTATIC SEPARATOR FOR FINE COAL CLEANING
Numerous advanced coal cleaning processes have been developed in recent years that are capable of substantially reducing both ash- and sulfur-forming minerals from coal. However, most of the processes involve fine grinding and use water as the cleaning medium; therefore, the clean coal products must be dewatered before they can be transported and burned. Unfortunately, dewatering fine coal is costly, which makes it difficult to deploy advanced coal cleaning processes for commercial applications. As a means of avoiding problems associated with the fine coal dewatering, the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) developed a dry coal cleaning process in which mineral matter is separated from coal without using water. In this process, pulverized coal is subjected to triboelectrification before being placed in an electric field for electrostatic separation. The triboelectrification is accomplished by passing a pulverized coal through an in-line mixer made of copper. Copper has a work function that lies between that of carbonaceous material (coal) and mineral matter. Thus, coal particles impinging on the copper wall lose electrons to the metal thereby acquiring positive charges, while mineral matter impinging on the wall gain electrons to acquire negative charges. The charged particles then pass through an electric field where they are separated according to their charges into two or more products depending on the configuration of the separator. The results obtained at NETL showed that it is capable of removing more than 90% of the pyritic sulfur and 70% of the ash-forming minerals from a number of eastern U.S. coals. However, the BTU recoveries were less than desirable. The laboratory-scale batch triboelectrostatic separator (TES) used by NETL relied on adhering charged particles on parallel electrode surfaces and scraping them off. Therefore, its throughput will be proportional to the electrode surface area. If this laboratory device is scaled-up as is, it would suffer from low throughput capacities and high maintenance requirements. In general, surface area-based separators (e.g., shaking tables, magnetic drum separator, electrodynamic separator, etc.) have lower throughput capacities than volume-based separators (e.g., flotation cell, dense-medium bath, cyclones, etc.) by an order of magnitude. Furthermore, the electrodes of the laboratory unit need to be cleaned frequently, creating a high maintenance requirement if it is scaled-up to a commercial unit. The bench-scale continuous TES unit developed at NETL, on the other hand, separates positively and negatively charged particles by splitting the gaseous stream containing these particles in an electric field by means of a flow splitter, so that the oppositely charged particles can be directed into different compartments. This device is fundamentally different from the laboratory unit in that the former is a surface area-based separator, while the latter is a volume-based separator. The bench-scale unit is referred to as an entrained flow separator by the in-house researchers at NETL. Thus, the entrained flow TES unit is a significant improvement over the laboratory unit with regard to throughput capacity. In the present work, the entrained flow separator concept will be utilized for developing a proof-of concept (POC) separator that can be scaled-up to commercial size units. To accomplish this, it is necessary to develop a bench-scale separator that can achieve high Btu recoveries while maintaining the high degree of separation efficiencies. It is the objective of the present investigation to develop an efficient separator by studying the mechanisms of triboelectrification and investigating better ways of separating the charged particles. An important criterion for developing efficient separators is that they not only provide high separation efficiencies but also have high throughput capacities, which are essential ingredients for successful commercialization.
- Research Organization:
- Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University (US)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- (US)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC22-95PC95151
- OSTI ID:
- 824952
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: PBD: 30 Apr 2001
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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POC-scale testing of a dry triboelectrostatic separator for fine coal cleaning. Third quarterly technical progress report, April 1996--June 30, 1996
POC-SCALE TESTING OF A DRY TRIBOELECTROSTATIC SEPARATOR FOR FINE COAL CLEANING