Coal flotation of low-grade Pennsylvania anthracite silts

Technical Report · Mon May 13 04:00:00 EDT 1963

OSTI ID:5269659

Liu, H S; Sun, S C

Even though some high-grade silts have been retreated, there has been very little reclamation of coal from the enormous amount of low-grade Pennsylvania anthracite silts. The low-grade silts are difficult to reclaim by commonly used coal preparation methods, inasmuch as they are as high as 53 percent mineral matter and are extremely fine in particle size. Therefore most silts are still considered as waste materials. Attempts have been made to use these low-grade anthracite silts directly without beneficiation; however, difficulties were experienced in feeding these sticky silts into the furnace. The above reasons led to the present investigation for finding a suitable concentration process to recover the valuable coal from the low-grade silts. The result is the establishment of a flotation method for recovering coal from three low-grade silts, composed of 40 to 53 percent ash and of 36 to 82 percent of minus 400-mesh fine particles. This method involves a four-stage flotation, namely one rougher and three cleaners. Fuel oil and pine oil are used as collector and frother, respectively. The rougher froth is subsequently cleaned three times with minor additions of reagents. With this method 80 to 85 percent of the combustible material in these low-grade silts could be recovered as clean coal product of 14 to 16 percent ash. A flowsheet is proposed for the industrial application of this flotation method which requires neither desliming prior to flotation nor the assistance of any other concentration method. The resulting clean coal products can be marketed as a high Btu fuel. Additional experimentation is being conducted to establish whether this flotation process may also, by removing the clamp, alleviate the difficulties of feeding silts into power plant furnaces.

• Research Organization: Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park (USA). Dept. of Mineral Preparation
• OSTI ID: 5269659
• Report Number(s): SR-39
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

01 COAL, LIGNITE, AND PEAT
010800 -- Coal
Lignite
& Peat-- Waste Management
013000* -- Coal
Lignite
& Peat-- Transport
Handling
& Storage
ANTHRACITE
CARBONACEOUS MATERIALS
COAL
COAL FINES
COAL PREPARATION
COAL PREPARATION PLANTS
COHERENT SCATTERING
DIFFRACTION
ENERGY SOURCES
FLOTATION
FOSSIL FUELS
FUELS
INDUSTRIAL PLANTS
MANAGEMENT
MATERIALS RECOVERY
MINERAL WASTES
MINERALS
NORTH AMERICA
PENNSYLVANIA
PROCESSING
RESOURCE CONSERVATION
SCATTERING
SEPARATION PROCESSES
SILT
SOLID WASTES
USA
WASTE MANAGEMENT
WASTE PROCESSING
WASTES
X-RAY DIFFRACTION