Triboelectrostatic Separation-anEfficient Method of Producing Low Ash Clean Coal

At present, coal is mainly consumed as fuel. In fact, coal is also a kind of precious raw material in chemical industry on the premise that some harmful minerals should be removed from coal. The paper presents the results of the research on producing low ash (<2%) coal with triboelectrostatic separator used for producing high-grade active carbon. The test is conducted in bench-scale system, whose capacity is 30～100 kg/h. The results indicate that: 1) the ash content of clean coal increases with the increase of solid content of feedstock, on the contrary, the yield of clean coal is declining; 2) a high velocity may result in a good separation efficiency; 3) for the same solid content, the reunion caused by intermolecular force makes the separation efficiency drop down when the ultra-fine coal is separated; 4) the separation efficiency is improved with the increase of electric field intensity, but there is a good optimized match between the electric field intensity and yield of clean coal; 5) a low rank coal is easy-to-wash in triboelectrostatic separation process; 6) the yield of clean coal can be enhanced and the ash decreased through adapting optimized conditions according to various coals.