Coal Ash Beneficiation and Utilization in Coal Separation Process

In recent years, coal production and consumption increased dramatically, especially in China. So, more and more attentions have been paid to coal preparation and coal ash utilization with the growing concern about the pollution by fly ash. The unburned carbon in fly ash significantly affects its utilization in many fields, especially in concrete production industry. Technologies such as flotation, triboelectrostatic separation and carbon burnout have been developed to remove carbon from coal ash. This paper introduces chemical compositions of a typical coal ash and a dry beneficiation method. For some kinds of fly ash, magnetically stabilized fluidized bed was studied to recover magnetic pearls from fly ash. The magnetic pearls are mainly composed of Fe3O2 and Fe3O4 and are mostly hollow spheres. The size distributions of three kinds of magnetic pearls are from 300 to 25 μm. A magnetic pearls fluidized bed and a magnetically stabilized magnetic pearls fluidized bed for coal dry separation are studied in the paper. 1 Corresponding author: Tel. +1 859 257 4124; Fax: (859)323-1962; E-mail address: [email protected] 1 2005 World of Coal Ash (WOCA), April 11-15, 2005, Lexington, Kentucky, USA http://www.flyash.info