Processes wood coking process

Approximately 50—55% of the product from a coal-tar refinery is pitch and another 30% is creosote. The remaining 15—20% is the chemical oil, about half of which is naphthalene. Creosote is used as a feedstock for production of carbon black and as a wood preservative. Because of modifications to modem coking processes, tar acids such as phenol and cresyUc acids are contained in coal tar in lower quantity than in the past. To achieve economies of scale, these tar acids are removed from cmde coal tar with a caustic wash and sent to a central processing plant where materials from a number of refiners are combined for recovery. 

Once the volatile prodiicts have been pyrolyzed, one is left with a material that is mostly carbon, and these are called coke (from coal) and charcoal (from wood). Coke was of course used in blast furnaces to make iron (the volatiles would make the process less reproducible in reducing Fc203) by our ancestors, while charcoal was used in soap (mainly the alkalis in the ash) and as an adsorbent. 

This process may also be referred to as destmctive distillation. It has been appHed to a whole range of organic materials, more particularly to natural products such as wood (qv), sugar (qv), and vegetable matter to produce charcoal (see Fuels frombiomass). However, in the present context, coal usually yields coke, which is physically dissimilar from charcoal and appears with the more familiar honeycomb-type stmcture (27). 

Documented efforts at cokemaking date from 1584 (34), and have seen various adaptations of conventional wood-charring methods to the production of coke including the eventual evolution of the beehive oven, which by the mid-nineteenth century had become the most common vessel for the coking of coal (2). The heat for the process was suppHed by burning the volatile matter released from the coal and, consequently, the carbonization would progress from the top of the bed to the base of the bed and the coke was retrieved from the side of the oven at process completion. 

In the case of low temperature tar, the aqueous Hquor that accompanies the cmde tar contains between 1 and 1.5% by weight of soluble tar acids, eg, phenol, cresols, and dihydroxybenzenes. Both for the sake of economics and effluent purification, it is necessary to recover these, usually by the Lurgi Phenosolvan process based on the selective extraction of the tar acids with butyl or isobutyl acetate. The recovered phenols are separated by fractional distillation into monohydroxybenzenes, mainly phenol and cresols, and dihydroxybenzenes, mainly (9-dihydroxybenzene (catechol), methyl (9-dihydtoxybenzene, (methyl catechol), and y -dihydroxybenzene (resorcinol). The monohydric phenol fraction is added to the cmde tar acids extracted from the tar for further refining, whereas the dihydric phenol fraction is incorporated in wood-preservation creosote or sold to adhesive manufacturers. Naphthalene Oils. Naphthalene is the principal component of coke-oven tats and the only component that can be concentrated to a reasonably high content on primary distillation. Naphthalene oils from coke-oven tars distilled in a modem pipe stiU generally contain 60—65% of naphthalene. They are further upgraded by a number of methods. 

Charcoal—sulfur processes need low ash hardwood charcoal, prepared at 400—500°C under controlled conditions. At the carbon disulfide plant site, the charcoal is calcined before use to expel water and residual hydrogen and oxygen compounds. This precalcination step minimises the undesirable formation of hydrogen sulfide and carbonyl sulfide. Although wood charcoal is preferred, other sources of carbon can be used including coal (30,31), lignite chars (32,33), and coke (34). Sulfur specifications are also important low ash content is necessary to minimise fouling of the process equipment. 

Some chemical processes use energy directly to drive the transformation. For example, the conversion of iron ore, iron oxide, to iron metal requires chemical energy to remove the oxygen atoms. In early times the iron ore was heated with charcoal in more recent times it is heated with refined coal (coke), but in both cases the result is conversion of coal or wood into carbon monoxide, which is toxic but can be burned to carbon dioxide to generate needed heat. There is now interest in devising processes that do not use carbon in this way, but use electrical energy to avoid the production of carbon oxides. 

Burning tires in existing pulp and paper mills and certain types of cement kilns requires much less capital investment than the dedicated power plants mentioned above. Pulp and paper mills often bum hog-fuel (chipped wood), thus requiring very little modification for tire chips. The main economic variable is the price of the competing fuel. Tire-derived fuel must often compete with low cost coal or petroleum coke, a waste product from the petroleum refining process. If tdf is only slightly cheaper than the alternate fuel, then plant modification cannot be justified. 

The raw materials for activated carbon are carbonaceous matters, such as wood, peat, coals, petroleum coke, bones, coconut shells, and fruit nuts. Anthracite and bituminous coals have been the major sources. Starting with the initial pores present in the raw material, more pores, with desired size distributions, are created by the so-called activation process. After initial treatment and pelletizing, one activation process involves carbonization at... 

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