Effect of moisture on anthracite crushing behavior and grinding energy consumption

The change of water occurrence form and content in coal will change the physical characteristics and pore structure of coal, and then affect its crushing process.In order to study the effect of moisture contained in coal on on the crushing behavior of coal particles,anthracite coal was used as the research object. A Hastelloy grinding equipped with a power measuring device was applied to simulate the crushing environment in a medium-speed coal mill. The individual and mixed crushing experiments were carried out in multi-time batches of coal samples with different water content. Thus, the effects of water occurrence on coal crushing rate, pulverized coal fineness, and grinding energy consumption were studied. The experimental results showed that compared with the original coal samples, the initial particle size material crushing rate of homogenized soaked coal samples decreases significantly due to the increase of water content, its grindability index first decreased and then increased with increasing the water content when the homogenized immersed coal sample was crushed separately, and the fineness of pulverized coal t₁₀ was positively correlated with water content. When dry and wet coal samples were mixed and crushed, the crushing rate and fine-grained material generation rate of 13.34% moisture content samples were much higher than that of homogenized soaked coal samples with the same moisture content, and their its grindability index was larger than that of the original coal; The grindability index of the blended coal samples with other moisture contents was slightly smaller than that of the homogenized soaked coal samples, and this difference became larger with the increase of moisture content, while the crushing rate and the yield of fine-grained materials differed less from that of the homogenized impregnated coal samples. Also, the result indicated that the classical energy-particle size relationship model may be used to characterize the individual and mixed crushing processes of samples with different moisture gradients. The internal and external moisture reduced the ability of anthracite to resist crushing to varying degrees, and increasing the water content during separate crushing improved the energy efficiency significantly. So, the water content parameters were introduced into the energy consumption model to characterize the crushing process of various moisture coal samples. By exploring the influence mechanism of water content in coal on energy consumption of coal crushing, it reveals the way of energy loss in the process of coal crushing and provides theoretical guidance for optimizing coal crushing process and reducing energy consumption.