Quality improvements for South African coal fines by flotation with montenol and agglomeration

Abstract: Coal is an important fossil fuel and as a source of energy for South Africa and globally. Fine coal has been since an unattractive product because of problems associated but not limited to handling and transportation. With the depreciation of coal quality, better coal products are reserved for the export market leaving the poor quality coal products for domestic electricity generation. Based on the latter, this has resulted in interest and advancement in the coal processing techniques and progressive technologies. With these recent developments, fines can be processed, prepared and sold for profit. The current work focused of flotation of discards with the aim to upgrade the quality of coal. Flotation with Montenol 800 and 505 produced a clean coal product with high ash reduction with a very good combustibles recovery after 30 and 35 minutes milling of the fine coal sample, but this has proven to be over milling as coal is soft. This is supported by the sampled milled for only one minute where there was consistency over 40% separation efficiency over all different times employed. The ash rejections were over 40% and 45% for Montenol 505 and 800 respectively with the very high combustible recovery higher than 95% for Montenol 505. The results showed that fine coal cleaning using Montenol is possible to increase the quality of coal. The sample was further agglomerated using different binders; all binders considered yielded bigger pellets with only a small fraction of particles that were less than 5mm. In addition, it was found that the final product was of a better quality in terms of reduced moisture, CV and ash content