Search results

A detailed analytical study of Leping bark liptobiolith in Jiangxi was conducted to determine its petrographic characteristics and depositional environment based on coal petrography and geochemistry. Results indicate that barkinite mainly occurs in the middle and lower coal sea4ms, whereas less barkinite and more vitrinite occur in the middle and upper coal seams. Coal facies analysis of bark liptobiolith was performed to determine its characteristics under various depositional conditions, such as the presence of a water table and gelification during coal formation. Results indicate that the environmental evolution of bark liptobiolith begins from brackish-marine swamp facies (barkinite-rich coal seam) and ends in back barrier swamp facies (barkinite-poor coal seam).

Increasing scarcity of natural resources and the adverse effects of unsustainable practices call for more and more efficient management strategies in the energy industry. The quality of the coke plays a significant role in the quality and durability of the output steel which is produced using the energy from the coal. This paper aims to investigate the dynamic coal blending problem under overall cost and coke quality constraints in the steel industry within a periodic cycle of operations.

Considering the variability of the natural properties over a periodic cycle, this study proposes a multi-period mixed-integer non-linear programming formulation to optimize the total blending costs while taking various coke quality constraints into account. Besides, this study applies factorial design to investigate about the significant effect of coal proportions as well as improvement into the overall cost of blending.

In this case study, utilizing real data from a coal blending facility in India, through a factorial design, the authors obtain optimal desirable levels of coal proportions and their criticality levels towards the total cost of blending (TCB) or objective function. This analysis reflects the role of the coke quality constraints in the objective function value while characterizing the price of sustainability for the case study among other critical insights.

Objective function (or TCB) includes basic coal cost, movement cost and environmental costs during the coal and coke processing at a coke-oven and blast furnace of steel industry. The price of sustainability provides managerial insights on that sacrifices the industry has to make in order to become more “sustainable”.

Hardgrove grindability index (HGI) is an important physical parameter used to demonstrate the relative hardness of coal particles. Modeling of HGI based on coal conventional properties is a quite complicated procedure. The paper aims to develop a new accurate model for prediction of HGI that is called optimized evolutionary neural network (OPENN).

The procedure for generation of the proposed OPENN predictive model was performed in two stages. In the first stage, as the high dimensionality involved in the input space, a correlation-based feature selection (CFS) algorithm was used to select the most important influencing variables for HGI prediction. In the second stage, a combination of differential evolution (DE) and biography-based optimization (BBO) algorithms as a global search method were applied to evolve weights of a multi-layer perception neural network.

The proposed OPENN was examined and compared with other typical models using a wide range of Kentucky coal samples. The testing results showed that the accuracy of the proposed OPENN model is significantly better than the other typical models and can be considered as a promising alternative for HGI prediction.

As HGI test is relatively expensive procedure, there is an economical interest on HGI modeling based on coal conventional properties (proximate, ultimate and petrography); the proposed OPENN model to estimate HGI would be a valuable and practical tool for coal industry.

The subject coverage of the Coal Data Base is very large and represents an amalgam of the interests of the member countries who supply input. The basic coverage is as listed in the contents page of Coal Abstracts:

The dates for the conference of the International Federation for Documentation to be held in London in September 1961 have now been settled finally. They differ slightly from those already notified to members of Aslib, who are now requested to note that the first public session will take place at 2.30 p.m. on Tuesday 12th September. The last public session will take place during the afternoon of Friday 15th September and it is hoped to arrange a conference dinner on the evening of the same day. Aslib members who are making early reservations of accommodation in London for the conference should make a special note of this timetable.