Prediction of economic operating conditions for Indian coal preparation plants

The most important optimization concept, which, has long been recognized in coal preparation with multiple cleaning circuits, is the constant incremental quality approach. However, this approach maximizes the overall plant yield for a targeted product quality, without putting any emphasis on coal value/price. So, sometimes confusion arises in the determination of the overall plant yield that would more than offset the price due to lower quality of product. In this paper a method is presented to maximize the coal value by considering the equal incremental quality approach as well. Here the predicted yield of composite coal has been calculated by using a designed probable error value, then the value of a particular coal is maximized. A case study with six different coals of different characteristics is presented to ascertain the merit of this approach. This technique offers the coal preparation engineer an effective and straight forward method for determining the optimum cut points of separation for different coals to achieve maximum economic gain.