Determination of reactive effects on dewatering of small sized coals on vibration screen by data analysis

The present research covers experiments carried out with the purpose of investigating the dewatering of coal fines and its data analyses. Firstly, the parameters of the vibrating screen (incline, frequency, feeding rate and screen size), the effects of the application of additional vertical mechanical vibration and surface active reagents were investigated by utilizing the vibrating screen mechanism. At the end of the optimization experiments of the vibrating screen parameters, 61.0 % moisture of the feed decreased to 42.3 % moisture. After optimum parameters obtained in dewatering processes carried out with the vibrating screen, the vertical mechanical vibration and added reagents were kept constant and with increased surface area of the screen the moisture level was reduced from 61.0 % to of 38.7 %. Finally, by using Mathematica algebra computer package we set up a program to analyze our experimental data, where three-dimensional data processing has been applied on minimizing the final moisture by considering amount of reactive and pH. More over the effect of increased surface area of the screen is a well-known parameter in increasing the effectiveness of dewatering, here we represent the effect by considering the amount of reactive and determined the required screen area. Further, as the experimental data were correlated using Mathematica program where nonlinear surface fitting was applied to the data with minimum squares method. We obtained our data illustrations by 3D graphics in order to represent the dependence of reactive amount and pH on dewatering efficiency with best performing surfactant CTAB. The laboratory scale experiments' data analyses showed the most available dewatering conditions within the closest approach (R²=0.95) to our testing parameters.