Experimental study on the contribution of included/excluded minerals to particulate formation during coal char combustion

Abstract

The contributions of included and excluded minerals to particulate matter formation are quantified in this work. By devolatilization of three typical Chinese coals, three coal chars with low (LA), moderate (MA), and high ash (HA) content (with both included and excluded minerals) were prepared, from which three float coal chars with low (LA−), moderate (MA−), and high ash (HA−) content (without excluded minerals) were separated by density differentiation method. The coal chars before and after separation were burned in a drop-tube furnace at 1600 K, the results of three float coal chars can directly reveal the contribution of included minerals, and the comparison of two kinds of chars with and without excluded minerals would reveal the excluded mineral contribution to ash distribution. The size distributions of the combustion-generated ash particle were obtained from the combination of ELPI+ and laser particle-size analyzer. The fractions of included/excluded minerals were obtained from SEM images. The results from the combustion of the float chars indicate the physical transformation of included minerals, while the results from original coal chars involve the transformation of both included and excluded minerals. Results indicate that the distribution of ash particles from included minerals for HA− char possesses a single peak, while the ash distributions of MA− and LA− char show a bi-modal shape. The excluded minerals in LA and MA chars mainly contribute to the ash emissions with sizes larger than 80 μm. The contribution from excluded minerals reach 86% to the ash particles of 205 μm for HA char, 54% for MA char and 51% for LA char. The number fractions of included minerals continuously decrease with a transformation into excluded minerals during char dynamic combustion.