Simulation of coal preparation plants

Abstract

Coal preparation is a process for removing physical impurities from coal. The process is carried out in large plants whose capa cities range from 500 to 20,000 tons of coal per day. There are about 500 such plants within the United States. A coal preparation plant simulator was developed under the sponsorship of the U.S. Department of Energy for simulating coal preparation plant performance. The simulator contains mathe matical models describing all the major components of an actual coal preparation plant. Moreover, it utilizes a network-type struc ture, thus permitting the simulator to be used for a wide variety of different plant configurations. Both the models and the net work structure are described in this paper. Results are shown for a sample problem, which is representative of an actual coal preparation plant configuration.