Scholarly record

CHARACTERISTICS OF ASH DUMPS OF COAL-FIRED POWER PLANTS IN THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION

Leonid Delitsyn, Mikhail Sulman, Ruslan Kulumbegov, Oleg Popel, Victoria Petropavlovskaya

Abstract

A key environmental and technological problem for coal-fired generation in the Russian Federation is the overfilling of existing ash disposal sites. The total volume of accumulated solid coal combustion waste has reached 2 billion tons. It is important to emphasize that this figure reflects only the accumulated "legacy burden" and is not a fixed value: the industry generates about 20 million tons of new waste annually. Consequently, the actual mass of this waste requiring disposal or processing is steadily increasing, exacerbating the shortage of storage space and increasing environmental risks. The main component of coal combustion waste is fly ash (the most industrially sought-after), which is characterized by a wide variability in physical and chemical properties. These properties are determined by a combination of factors: the type and quality of the coal burned, the design features of the boiler equipment, and the type of ash collection devices (cyclones, collection chambers, Venturi tubes). This paper examines fly ash from the combustion of coal from the main fuel and energy sources in the Russian Federation, accumulated in volumes exceeding 5 million tons, which is considered the critical threshold for cost-effective processing. A detailed characterization of the material (chemical, phase) and granulometric composition of fly ash from various thermal power plants is provided.

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