As coke is a heterogeneous, porous and fissured solid, the adequate information concerning the mechanical properties of coke itself has not been obtained in spite of the necessity to be clarified. Such practical measures as the shatter test and drum test give little fundamental knowledge.
In the present investigation, the Knoop hardness, by which the yield stress or the plastic flow stress could be obtained in an ideal hardness test, was adopted.
Five kinds of coke-two for blast furnace, two for foundry and one for general use were cut into small square blocks at 2cm and 9cm distant from coke oven wall end, and then planes vertical and parallel to coke oven wall were polished plishad surfaces of rectangular specimens were pressed with a diamond Knoop indenter at various tempera-tures from 20°C to 1, 100°C during heating.
The trend of the Knoop hardness of five cokes to temperature was much the same, and there was little variance in hardness with kineds of coke, the orientation and the distance from oven wall end.
At a room temperature Knoop hardness number H is about 280kg/mm
2, which agrees closelly with those obtained by other workers. It does not change up to 500°C, but begins to decrease slightly at 700°C. With increasing temperature from 900°C to 1, 100°C H abruptly decreases to 150kg/mm
2, which is about one-half of the value at a room temperature. Young's modulus and failure stress of coke deduced from hardness number are 7.7×10
10dyne/cm
2, 7×10
9 dyne/cm
2 respectively at a room temperature.
The thermal dependences of hardness is reversible under heating and cooling for all cokes except one, so that it seems the decrease of H at high temperatures is not due to the structual transformation of coke, but to the thermal energy.
From these results it is considered that coke is composed of segments which have primary bonds and are in random orientation in the mass.
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