Automatic petrographic analysis of single seam coals

Anew system has been developed to improve the interlaboratory accuracy in maceral and reflectance analysis of single seam bituminous coals. It performs automatically both types of analysis, following the same steps as the manual method. Scanning, focusing and analysis are automatic; only preparation of coal samples and starting requires a human operator. The main and most novel Idea of this approach is to coordinate an expert system with an image processing system using both reflectance and morphological information. In this way the system tries to reproduce the analysis procedure followed by a human exper