Application of Vibrating Fluidized Bed in Low Rank Coal Drying Process

Low rank coal is an important energy resource in the world, particularly in the developing countries. But its high water content causes a waste of energy and serious environmental pollution, which restricts its applications. In order to improve the efficiency of the low rank coal and reduce pollution, the drying processes for low rank coal are urgently needed. This paper presented a review of the general drying processes for low rank coal. In the review, the newly-developed vibrating fluidized bed (VFB) drying process was emphasized. This novel VFB drying process which can be used in large-scale industrial production has several advantages, such as high speed, high drying intensity and low pollution. Moreover, two VFB researches reported by the authors were also introduced. In these researches, the dynamic behavior of VFB was simulated by two commercial codes of ADAMS and ANSYS separately. According to the simulation results, the exciting force and the structure of sieve box were optimized.