Technical Market Support » General
This report presents a new coal analysis method which is based on combining the complementary features of two different microscopy systems used to characterize organic constituents (macerals) and minerals in industrial applications. For the first time, it is now possible to combine detailed mineral and maceral information to describe the texture and chemistry of individual coal particles. The new method is called CMMA (Combined Mineral and Maceral Analysis). It is a practical method for coal technology applications that can be used to analyse large numbers of particles to provide statistically relevant assays.
The work was based on the MLA (Mineral Liberation Analyser) developed by JKTech Pty. Ltd. and the OPTICOAL® quantitative microscopy system for coal analysis developed by Jenkins-Kwan Technology Pty. Ltd. The MLA is a complete microscopy solution designed to provide quantitative analysis of representative mineral samples to increase mining productivity and metal recovery. The OPTICOAL® system is the successor to the MACE®300 coal analysis technique developed earlier with assistance from ACARP and Carl Zeiss Germany, and is the world's only system capable of performing advanced coal petrography tests and producing images of characterized coal particles and macerals.
The power of the combined technique was demonstrated with five case studies. It was beyond the ability of this written report to fully explore the numerous ways in which the data could be extracted and interpreted. Therefore, the result databases and software tools for metallurgical analyses have been provided with this report on CDROM as a resource for future analysis developments and training workshops.
In conclusion, the new technique is sufficiently developed and supported to enable progress to the next stage of development where it can be evaluated by coal technologists and process engineers in real-world problem solving applications. The investment required to streamline the technology and commercialise a product would be high and could only be justified if applications were identified that were attractive to the industry, that provided sufficient value-adding to operations, and provided sufficient demand to allow service laboratories to operate CMMA profitably.