Vaishali Pendse and H. Kumar
Abstract
Clean coal technology is a catch-all term to describe various technologies that can be deployed to reducethe environmental impacts associated with the use of coal.Chemical washing of coal is one of the main techniques to accomplish this goal.Indian coals are mostly of high ash content, further the washability characteristics of Indian coals are not good. Therefore it is difficult to remove the mineral matter from coal by conventional physical coal washing techniques.Thus, this may require chemical treatment techniques to remove mineral matter from the coal. Five coal samples were collected from different geological regions of Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh (India) and were subjected to anthracene oil solvent extraction (organorefining). The washability characteristics of original coals and solvent extracted residual coals for 12 hours and 24 hours were studied by the float and sink technique. The changes in washabilitycharacteristics of residual coals were compared with those of the original coals. It was observed that the washability of original coal was improved substantially by anthracene oil extraction.