Development of an Advanced Fine Coal Suspension Dewatering Process
With the advancement in fine coal cleaning technology, recovery of fine coal (minus 28 mesh) has become an attractive route for the U.S. coal industry. The clean coal recovered using the advanced flotation technology i.e. column flotation, contains on average 20% solids and 80% water, with an average particle size of 35 microns. Fine coal slurry is usually dewatered using a vacuum dewatering technique, providing a material with about 25 to 30 percent moisture. The process developed in this project will improve dewatering of fine (0.6mm) coal slurry to less than 20 percent moisture. Thus, thermal drying of dewatered wet coal will be eliminated. This will provide significant energy savings for the coal industry along with some environmental benefits. A 1% increase in recovery of coal and producing a filter cake material of less than 20 % moisture will amount to energy savings of 1900 trillion Btu/yr/unit. In terms of the amount of coal it will be about 0.8% of the total coal being used in the USA for electric power generation. It is difficult to dewater the fine clean coal slurry to about 20% moisture level using the conventional dewatering techniques. The finer the particle, the larger the surface area and thus, it retains large amounts of moisture on the surface. The coal industry has shown some reluctance in using the advanced coal recovery techniques, because of unavailability of an economical dewatering technique which can provide a product containing less than 20% moisture. The U.S.DOE and Industry has identified the dewatering of coal fines as a high priority problem. The goal of the proposed program is to develop and evaluate a novel two stage dewatering process developed at the University of Kentucky, which involves utilization of two forces, namely, vacuum and pressure for dewatering of fine coal slurries. It has been observed that a fine coal filter cake formed under vacuum has a porous structure with water trapped in the capillaries. When this porous cake is subjected to pressure for a short time, the free water present is released from the filter cake. Laboratory studies have shown that depending on the coal type a filter cake containing about 15% moisture could be obtained using the two-stage filtration technique. It was also noted that applying intermittent breaks in vacuum force during cake formation, which disturbed the cake structure, helped in removing moisture from the filter cakes. In this project a novel approach of cleaning coal using column flotation was also developed. With this approach the feed capacity of the column is increased significantly, and the column was also able to recover coarser size coal which usually gets lost in the process. The outcome of the research benefits the coal industry, utility industry, and indirectly the general public. The benefits can be counted in terms of clean energy, cleaner environment, and lower cost power.
- Research Organization:
- Univ. of Kentucky, Lexington, KY (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- FG26-05NT42499
- OSTI ID:
- 970043
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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