Technical Market Support » Future Technologies
The development of alternative power generation technologies, which utilise coal as a feedstock, has been fuelled as a result of environmental pressure. For the case of Australian black coals, one potential candidate for future power generation technologies is integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC). Although there are several gasifier technologies in operation throughout the world, open public data is still scarce. The objective of this project was to test a wide range of coal ranks under temperatures and pressures encountered in emerging and advanced power generation systems.
A related project (C6052) has compared the reactivity of black coals at conditions related to emerging and advanced technologies. A range of black coals was tested in an existing pressurised drop tube furnace at the CRC for New Technologies for Power Generation from Low Rank Coals. Chars were generated from a number of coals at temperatures of 1100?C and 1300?C and pressures of 1-15 atm with their subsequent reactivities to CO2, O2 and H2O determined for a number of these samples.
The specific project objectives were:
- To evaluate and compare the extent of partial oxidation and gasification on reactivity for Australian thermal coals ranging from low to high rank in a pressurised drop tube furnace.
- To compare the results obtained with those from other methods of investigating devolatilisation and reactivity of coal.
- To provide comparisons of conventional and advanced characterisation procedures relating to coal reactivity, environmental effects and ash formation.
A suite of coal and char samples were generated and distributed to Black Coal CRC researchers, in order to determine the suitability of conventional and advanced characterisation techniques in characterising coal and chars reactivity, environmental issues and mineral matter reaction areas.
The report presents comparisons of conventional and advanced characterisation procedures relating to coal reactivity, environmental effects and ash formation, and lists those that did and did not characterise coal performance in this study.
A relationship between pyrolysis pressure and char/ash characteristics has been observed and explained.
New char characteristics have been identified resulting in a new model to represent the char formation process.