Determination of total and fine airborne dust in coals
Issues on evaluation of coals ability to liberate airborne dust during transportation and transloading are nowadays relevantly current. In the current work, a new method was presented for evaluation of dust contents in coals. It is based on modeling of the processes of coals transloading and transportation. The essence is to stir coals sample of size <3mm at a constant rotation rate with a simultaneous passing a fixed volume of air through a filter system and determining the total airborne dust content and dust class sizes more or less than 10 microns. During the tests, a sample of commodity coal is used as a residue of a sieve analysis of the representative coal sample after the sieve of 3 mm. Experiments were held at two hard coals of the Kuznetsk coal basin differing in their metamorphism degree and petrographic composition. It was established that within the measurement error, the total amount of airborne dust able to be released during transloading for both the considered samples is comparable. On the other hand, the size classes distribution for dust particles over or less than 10 microns varies significantly and depends on the coals rank and petrographic composition. High inertinite contents determines, presumably, the increase of fine dust particles (less than 10 microns) in the total airborne dust released.