From Guest Blogger Charlie Hill: Benefits of Briquetting Technology

Briquetting is a process that agglomerate powders and fines together to produce solid briquettes under high pressure, and most of the time, with the help of binder and high pressure.

Initially, coal briquettes are made during WWII for home heating in cold winter. To this day, coal briquetting is still an effective way to recycle coal fines and upgrade LRC (low rank coal). This technique is widely used in countries that are rich in coal resources, like India, Australia, Indonesia, South Africa, China, etc.

First, wet coal fines are dried to 10-12% moisture content. Optimal particle size is below 3mm. Some percentage of bigger size is allowed, because a wide rage of particle size helps to form strong briquettes. Then coal powder is mixed evenly with binder. Common binder for coal briquettes is water glass. Although many different types of binder are workable, this one is easily available and cheap.

A set of coal briquetting line could now produce 1-30t/h briquettes. Final products are used for home & industrial heating, cooking, gasification, etc.

In the later days, the application of briquetting process is expanded to metallurgy, chemicals, building materials, mining industries.

For example, in mining process, many ore fines are inevitably generated, and the amout is huge. How to handle these so-called wastes? Can we recycle them? The answer is YES. With briquetting machine, these fines are compressed tightly. They can be fed into melt furnace.

In steel production, mill scale is produced as by-products. They share the same composition with steel. For steel plant, it’s an opportunity to creat market sales. Mill scale briquettes could be reused.

One important branch of briquetting is dry powder briquetting technology, during which no water and binder is added. Some materials would react with water, some processes require no water. As water and binder play a role to adhesive particles, without them, higher pressure is seen as compensation to produce strong briquettes. The typical application of lime briquetting.

By: Charlie Hill