Mobile Coal Sampling Equipment

Quality of coal plays an important role in all its utilization activities. Depending on the ultimate objective, be it steel making or power generation, the feed coal must satisfy some desired quality parameters. Coal being a highly heterogeneous substance in terms of inorganic and organic constituents, exhibits wide variability with respect to size and chemical compositions of the particles. Growing quality consciousness on the part of both suppliers and customers has made quality monitoring an integral part of the industrial activity. Proper quality monitoring of coal involves implementation of standardized procedures for sampling, sample preparation and analysis to provide a reliable estimate of the desired quality parameters at minimum variance.

The basic purpose of collecting and preparing a sample of coal is to provide a test sample which when analyzed will provide the test results representative of the lot sampled. Detailed documented procedures are laid down in National and International Standards for executing the job of representative sampling pertaining to different methods of sampling. However, due to time, technical and other economic constraints strict implementation of the procedures is difficult to practice for routine monitoring job. Modified methodologies are implemented after mutual consent of the seller and the purchaser. It is a known fact that about 80% of the total variances involved at the different stages of sample collection, preparation and analysis come from errors during its collection only. The important issue that is not always considered is the effect of modified procedures on the precision of the final result. This often leads to different controversies between the seller and the customer.

The Mobile Coal Sampling Equipment (MCSE) is the latest innovation from NuMAC. NuMAC has been working with the schematics and small models since 1996 and finally got the opportunity to developed the existing model in March 2008. MCSE is specially designed and manufactured for the purpose of collecting the coal samples for testing the coal quality for testing the coal quality using a mechanized Auger. In MCSE, dimension of the mechanized Auger have been designed by the IS-436 (Part-I/Section-I) standards. The equipment is mounted on a Hydraulically operated Retractable arm. It can be raised above the rail wagon and then lowered to collect the coal sample. The rotary motion of the Auger enables it to go down in the coal up to the desired depth and pick up the sample. The MCSE’s motor is reversed and the sample is collected in the desired bin. This complete assembly is mounted on a mobile unit that can easily go to the rail-wagon to be sampled.