Removal of Toxic Elements by Coal Cleaning

摘要

Many trace elements in coal which may become hazardous air pollutants upon combustion are associated with mineral matter. Previous studies have found that the elements arsenic, cadmium, lead, copper, mercury, nickel, selenium, zinc and manganese are of potentially serious concern to one's health and to the environment. All nine of these elements have been linked to the use of fossil fuels. In the present work, extensive coal cleaning tests has been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of precombustion coal cleaning on trace element reductions. For Korean anthracite, several trace elements, such as lead, manganese and mercury were reduced in excess of 70% by flotation. The total amount of trace element emissions per year were also estimated from a burning a raw coal and a physically cleaned coal. The total amount of trace emissions, in case of Korean anthracite, were reduced by flotation from 16.9 ton/year to 6.73 ton/year. For Dongjin coal from China, the reduction was over 50%, from 2.37 ton/year to 1.07 ton/year.