Investigation of the enrichment of Zonguldak fine coal

While coal preparation plants mainly consist of simple crushing, screening and cleaning processes for medium and size coal , fine coal circuits involves a series of sequential cleaning units and dewatering processes.In the past, coal fines were often considered to be too difficult to upgrade and simply discarded into waste disposal. Today, fine coal cleaning plays a important role to increase coal production and to reduce waste disposal and to prevent environmental pollution. Froth flotation is an established technique for the beneficiation of the coal fines. But environmental hazards, intensive use of reagents gravity based concentrators have been widely used for processing coal fines recently.Hard coal is only found in Zonguldak Coalfield in Turkey. Approximately twenty-five percent of the total coal is . Fine coal is dewatered and fed to power plant without cleaning. Recently, some factors including difficulty of obtaining coking coal and high coal prices have been obligated the cleaning of coal fines.In this study, experiments have been carried out using Zonguldak coal fines with different properties obtained from various collieries by applying traditional and enhanced gravity separators and then optimal conditions have been determined