Article pubs.acs.org/EF
Direct Coal Liquefaction: Low Temperature Dissolution Process Fatemehalsadat Haghighat and Arno de Klerk* Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2 V4, Canada ABSTRACT: The front-end design of a direct coal liquefaction process for the conversion of lignite into coal liquids by solvent extraction was investigated. The experimental work focused on physical coal dissolution in the temperature range 25−150 °C. It was found that the kinetics of physical coal dissolution was rapid and essentially complete within 2 min at 25 °C. There was a limiting extract yield, which increased with increasing temperature. Within the pore diameter range 0.1−10.7 μm, the volume of only pores with diameters
