Investigation of the effect of coal particle sizes on the interfacial and rheological properties of coal-water slurry fuels. Quarterly report No. 4, April 1, 1995--June 30, 1995

Experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of particle size on coal-water slurry (CWS) surface tension properties. Two different coal powder samples of different size ranges were obtained through sieving of coal from the Upper Elkhorn Seam. The surfactant (anionic DDBS-soft, dodecylbenzene sulfonic acid) concentration varied from 0 to 1.0% in weight while the coal loading remained at 40% in weight for all the cases. A du Nouy ring tensiometer and a maximum bubble pressure tensiometer measured the static and dynamic surface tensions, respectively. The results show that both static and dynamic surface tensions tend to increase with decreasing coal particle sizes suspended in CWS fuels. Examination of the peak pressure, minimum pressure, surfactant diffusion time, and dead time were also made to correlate these microscopic pressure behavior with the macroscopic dynamic surface tension and to examine the accuracy of the experiment