Vapor pressures and heats of vaporization of primary coal tars. Quarterly technical progress report, July 1--September 30, 1995

Abstract

There is significant current interest in general area of coal pyrolysis, particularly because of the central role of pyrolysis in all thermally driven coal conversion processes-gasification, combustion, liquefaction, mild gasification, or thermal beneficiation. There remain several key data needs in these application areas. Among them is a need for more reliable correlation for prediction of vapor pressure of heavy, primary coal tars. The vapor pressure correlations that exist at present for coal tars are very crude and they are not considered reliable to even an order of magnitude when applied to tars. The present project seeks to address this important gap in the near term by direct measurement of vapor pressures of coal tar fractions, by application of well-established techniques and modifications thereof. The principal objectives of the program are to: (1) obtain data on the vapor pressures and heats of vaporization of tars from a range of ranks of coal, (2) develop correlations based on a minimum set of conveniently measurable characteristics of the tars, (3) develop equipment that would allow performing such measurements in a reliable, straightforward fashion. A significant amount of time has been devoted during this quarter to extending the work on measurements of vapor pressures of tars. For this purpose, cellulose tar and cellulose tar related compounds have been selected as model systems. Cellulose tar has a much narrower distribution of molecular weight than does coal tar, and it is much more homogeneous. Thus it is better to develop the methods to be used for coal tars on this simpler model system first.