Concentrating Coke Oven Sized Inertinite-rich Particles to Study Their Behaviour in Targeted Coking Blends

Previous ACARP projects C24055 and C24059 showed that the water-based reflux classifier can successfully separate coal maceral concentrates without using dense media. Coal particles for maceral separation on these projects varied from 0.04-0.5 mm, while separating maceral concentrates using reflux classifier at coke oven sized particles (1.0-3.0 mm) has previously not been achieved.

The first goal of this project was to upgrade the existing reflux classifier to higher water flow rates for separating large sized coal macerals. The second goal was to study the influence of the large sized inertinite-rich particles on coking behaviour of other coking coals. To achieve these goals, the project has combined Computer Aided Thermal Analysis (CATA) for evaluating swelling and permeability, Dynamic Elemental Thermal Analysis (DETA) for measuring Carbon and Hydrogen evolutions, Pearson Coal Petrography for fused carbon analysis of cokes and Drop Shatter for testing coke strength. The existing CATA and DETA setups were previously used to evaluate thermo-swelling of coal samples at a small scale up to 4.0 grams per testing. This project also involved upgrading these apparatus for coking larger coal samples. The third goal of this project was to establish relationships between the concentrated inertinite-rich particles reflectogram and the measured physical and chemical changes of the targeted blends, to provide support for predicting coke strength.