Dewatering of fine coal using hyperbaric centrifugation

Many coal preparation plants are forced to discard their fine coal because of the inability of existing technologies to reduce the moisture content of this product to an acceptable level. In an effort to overcome this problem, a new mechanical dewatering method has been developed that combines centrifugation with pressure filtration. The process, which may be referred to as hyperbaric centrifugation, is capable of producing a drier product than can be achieved using either filtration or centrifugation alone. The test data obtained from batch experiments show that the new method can reduce cake moistures to 10% or below for many fine coal product streams.