Beneficiation of coal fines from soma coal washing plant tailings

Turkey has numerous coal washing plants. Fine coal wastes have been produced in these plants. Soma Washery is one of them. In this study, beneficiation of fine waste was aimed in order to provide economical benefit and reduce direct impacts on the environmental pollution by using gravity separation methods. After the concentration tests, the comparison was made between Multi Gravity Separator and Spiral concentrator according to the concentration criteria of both units. Representative fine coal sample used in the experiments contains about 54% ash. Spiral test results indicate that a clean coal having 14.81% ash content can be obtained. -0.038 mm size fraction was removed with 64% ash content by cyclone before spiral experiment. By using MGS two types clean coal can be obtained. A super quality clean coal having 9.69 % ash content was obtained as 7.3% by weight. On the other hand, second quality clean coal having 28.48% ash content can be produced as 14.2 % by weight, while final tailings can be discarded with 78.5% weight fraction and 78.10% ash content. Super quality clean coals can be used as a pulverized coal while second quality clean coal with ash content of 28% can be evaluated in power plant or domestic uses after briquetting. Final tailing can be used after thickening and filtration as filling material for underground coal mine.