Experimental Evaluation of Cohesion Properties for Various Coals

Assessing the handling properties of coal becomes a major issue for the operation of a fuel supply system in power plants, due to the increased types of coal imported into Korea. In this study, the cohesion strengths of 13 bituminous and sub-bituminous coals from different countries were tested by measuring the amount of force that leads to a failure of consolidated particles. The particle size was in the range of 0.1-2.8 mm, which represents the coarse particles before pulverization. While the cohesion strength was proportional to the compression force in the tested range, the effects of the surface moisture content and the weight fraction of fines were crucial for cohesive coals. At fixed conditions of surface moisture and particle size, large variations were found in the cohesion propensity between coals. For coals of 0.1-0.5 mm with the moisture added close to the critical value, cohesive coals had the density over 900 kg/m 3 after consolidation. The cohesion propensity was not correlated with the basic properties of coals with sufficient statistical significance.