Coke is a strategically important product

2024 Author: Howard Calhoun | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 10:16

Coke is a solid fuel of artificial origin, which is used mainly in blast furnaces for iron smelting. It is also used in the chemical, foundry and non-ferrous metallurgy industries. This combustible material can be petroleum, pitch, electrode or coal, depending on the raw material from which it is produced. Most coke is produced from hard coal.

Coke is a product that is obtained by heating the source material to temperatures close to a thousand degrees without air. As a result of chemical and physical processes, the output is a product that contains more than 96 percent of carbon. Ash, sulfur, phosphorus and other substances may also be present in coke, the amount of which, however, should not be high, because it can affect, for example, the quality of the steel smelted with this fuel. This composition allows the coke to release about 7,000 kilocalories when burning one kilogram of the substance.

Coke is a raw material that is used, among other things, in the production of electrodes. For this, the material is obtained by processing coal tar pitch (electrode coke) or productsdistillation of petroleum (petroleum coke). The latter options differ from coal in that they have a very low content of additional components (ash content from 0.3 to 0.8%).

Coke production includes several main stages, including:

- selection of coal grades (gas, fat, coking coals in different proportions can be used);

- mixing and crushing for blending;

- screening, enrichment, compaction, dosing, drying;

- placement in the oven with subsequent alignment with the coke pusher bar;

- direct coking process (about fourteen and a half hours), as a result of which the coals are sintered, and most of the excess substances (ammonia, tar, hydrogen, benzene class hydrocarbons, etc.) are removed from them;

- pushing the finished product into the quenching car;

-coke cooling with water in the quenching tower by abundant pouring;

- final sorting of the product into classes from 0-10 to more than 60 millimeters.

Coke, the photo of which is presented above, is a gray substance if it is made from coal raw materials. In the case of using oil or pitch in the initial stages, the shades of the final product of the coking process may be somewhat different.

Coke is a strategic product that must be constantly supplied to smelters. This is due to the technological processes in blast furnaces that work without stopping. If athe blast furnace stops for more than ten hours, then the metal inside solidifies, and it cannot be removed without destroying the structure of the furnace itself. For the same reason, coking industries are dependent on coal supplies, as furnaces are designed for non-stop operation for a quarter of a century (20-25 years). Stopping the coke production leads to the formation of hardened slags in the furnace chamber, which are extremely difficult to remove from there.