Abstract
In order to offer a better understanding of air pollution of China as well as East Asia we attempted to characterize the chemical properties of the raw coal materials mined in China and their combusted bottom ashes generated from coal fired power plant. To this end, we measured the chemical characteristics of individual bottom ashes and feed coal fragments collected at a coal fired power generator which was operated with the raw coal dug at a coal mine in China. The chemical properties of these two sample types were determined by a synchrotron radiation X-ray fluorescence (SR-XRF) microprobe method. Through an application of such technique, it was possible to draw the 2D elemental maps in and/or on raw coal fragments and fired bottom ashes. The pulverized fine pieces of feed coal mainly consisted of mineral components such as Fe, Ca, Ti, Ca, and Si, while Fe was detected as overwhelming majority. The elemental mass of combusted bottom ash shows strong enrichment of many elements that exist naturally in coal. There were significant variations in chemical properties of ash-to-ash and fragment-to-fragment. Although we were not able to clearly distinguish As and Pb peaks because of the folding in their X-ray energies, these two elements can be used as tracers of coal fire origin.
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Acknowledgements
This study was supported in part by funds from the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Priority Areas under Grant No. 14048212 and 14048213 from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), Japan. Also this study was partly carried out under the aid of the program “Establishment of COE on Sustainable-Energy System”. The synchrotron radiation experiments were performed at the SPring-8 with approval of the Japan Synchrotron Radiation Research Institute (JASRI) (Proposal No. 2002B0395-NOS-np, 2002A4029-LM-np).
The authors wish to express thanks to all the members of SPring-8, BL-37XU.
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Ma, CJ., Kim, JH., Kim, KH. et al. Specification of Chemical Properties of Feed Coal and Bottom Ash Collected at a Coal-fired Power Plant. Asian J. Atmos. Environ 4, 80–88 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03654868
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03654868