Production of inorganic pellet binders from fly-ash. Quarterly report, 1 December 1994--28 February 1995

Fly-ash is produced by all coal-fired utilities, and it must be removed from the plant exhaust gases, collected, and disposed of. While much work has been done in the past to utilize fly-ash rather than disposing of it, we nevertheless do not find widespread examples of successful industrial utilization. This is because past work has tended to find uses only for high-quality, easily-utilized fly-ashes, which account for less than 25% of the fly-ash that is produced. The main factor which makes fly-ashes unusable is a high unburned carbon content. In this project, physical separation technologies are being used to remove this carbon, and to convert these unusable fly-ashes into usable products. The main application being studied for the processed fly-ash is as a binder for inorganic materials, such as iron-ore pellets. Work in the first quarter concentrated on obtaining samples of all of the materials to be used (fly-ash, and magnetite ore), training of personnel on pelletization procedures, obtaining and setting up pelletization apparatus in the MTU laboratories, and running pelletization experiments with bentonite binder to establish a baseline for comparison with the fly-ash binders to be made