Coal/coke analysed using

Many of the materials we talk about and use every day are not pure compounds, but nevertheless you can obtain information about the properties of such materials. Data on materials such as coal, coke, petroleum products, and natural gas—which are the main sources of energy in this country—are available in reference books and handbooks. Some typical examples of analyses are shown in Tables 1.6 to 1.9. In the back of this book you will discover a number of appendices from which you can retrieve data necessary to solve most (but not all) of the problems at the end of the chapters. Scan through the appendices now. When you need to look... 

Several of the minor components of coal are of importance, because of the quantity present on occasion, but more so in some cases by virtue of the special properties they possess which are undesirable when the coal is used for certain purposes. For example, to arrive at a correct figure for the combustible carbon in coal, it is necessary to apply a correction for the quantity of carbonate associated with the sample. Combustion analyses determine only the total carbon. Again, coking coals should have low phosphorus content, and anthracites used for malting should contain only very small quantities of arsenic, so that the determination of these elements becomes necessary in certain cases. Since both are found normally in small amounts, they are not included in the general statement of the ultimate analysis but are reported separately. 

Petrographic analyses are also used to predict coke properties (such as strength) which would be produced from the coal. Other uses include the estimation of the chemical properties of fresh coals from the reflectance of weathered specimens. 

As extensively discussed in Section 2.3 and exemplified in Section 2.4, both CP/MAS and SPE/MAS NMR techniques have been used for decades as analytical methods for the study of carbon materials such as coal, pitch, cokes, chars, soil organic matter, and kerogens. In spite of quantitation problems and the question of uniform representation of the whole material, many important results have been derived from such analyses. 

This work describes the development of porosity in metallurgical cokes obtained from three series of coals with different extents of preoxidation. Mercury porosimetry and an optical microscope allied to an image analyser were used to measure porosity of cokes and results are compared. 

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