Application of Unburned Carbon Produced from Seochun Power Plant

Feasibility of utilizing unburned carbon residue in coal ash as a potential precursor for the production of activated carbon wasassessed to seek for solution to recycle unburned carbon residue. The unburned carbon concentrate generated from the 4 stagesof cleaner flotation has a grade of 87% carbon. The crystalline impurities in the concentrate included quartz and mullite.Unburned carbon had a low specific surface area of 10m 2 /g, which might be related to a high degree of coalification of domesticanthracite coal. Carbon particles were mostly porous and have a turbostratic structure. When 1g of carbon was activated with6g of KOH powder, the highest specific surface area value of 670m 2 /g was achieved. Low wettability of unburned carbon par-ticles, which was resulted from high temperature combustion in a boiler, might cause poor pore formation when they were acti-vated by KOH solution. The activated carbon produced in this study developed micropores, with an equivalent quality of * Received : November 5, 2013 · Revised : December 12, 2013 · Accepted : December 24, 2013Corresponding Author : Sujeong Lee (E-mail : crystal2@kigam.re.kr)Mineral Resources Research Division, Korea Institute of Geoscience & Mineral Resources, 124 Gwahang-no, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon,305-350 KoreaTel : +82-42-868-3125 / Fax : +82-42-868-3418ⓒThe Korean Institute of Resources Recycling. All rights reserved. This is an open-access article distributed under the termsof the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permitsunrestricted non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.