ADVANCED COMBUSTION ENGINEERING RESEARCH CENTER

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Kroo, E

1991

Network Changes During Coal Pyrolysis: Experiment and Theory

Solomon, P.R.; Charpenay, S.; Yu, Z.-Z.; Serio, M.A.; Kroo, E.; Solum, M.S. and Pugmire, R.J.
8th Annual International Pittsburgh Coal Conference, Pittsburgh, PA, October 1991. Funded by US Department of Energy and ACERC.

Coal pyrolysis is a complicated combination of chemical and physical processes in which coal is transformed at elevated temperatures to produce gases, tar, and char. These processes are described in the Functional Group - Depolymerization, Vaporization, and Crosslinking (FG-DVC) model of coal pyrolysis. An important aspect of this model is that crosslinking is rank dependent. This is based on solvent swelling experiments on chars made from coals of different rank. Low rank coals start to loose their solvent swelling ability prior to significant depolymerization at temperatures as low as 200ºC. Including such crosslinking in the FG-DVC model leads to predictions for low rank coals of a highly crosslinked network (exhibited by low solubility and low fluidity in chars) and low tar amounts.

While the model is in good agreement with a variety of data, it is difficult to find experiments to validate the predicted behavior of the network. In this paper we have used CP-MAS, NMR with dipolar dephasing and other techniques to examine the chars changing functional group and network characteristics. The changes in the char composition have been modeled using the FG-DVC model and the results compared with the data for Pittsburgh Seam bituminous coal and Zap lignite.