Solon Tagusagawa

Abstract:

Charcoal is an existing alternative to the use of coal and coke in the metallurgical industry, but it has inherently low mechanical strength. The existing methods to evaluate charcoal compression strength rely on preparing test specimens free of defects and compress it in the direction of the fibres. Since charcoal is anisotropic, these tests may not reveal the behaviour of charcoal, as a whole, when suffering compressive loads. As a consequence, such approach may not relate to industrial conditions, where the load on charcoal is not only on the direction of the fibres. This paper proposes a new method to quantify the effects of applying a compressing load on randomly distributed bulk charcoal, simulating what would be expected in industrial conditions, such as in a blast furnace, rather than the analysis of individual pieces of charcoal. It is shown that the results are normally distributed when analysed by means of the friability index proposed by ASTM D440.

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