The petrographic studies on coal are carried out by many Japanese steel mills for the following purposes:
1) Estimation of the coking property using a small amount of drilling core sample at coal.
2) Rapid checking of the quality of a shipment of coal.
3) Application as an auxiliary method in various studies.
It is of course desirable to use this technique for the routine operational control of coke plants, but the insufficiency of the reliability of it disturbs the actual application.
The authors, therefore, has studied on the following items to examine the repeat-ability within same laboratory and reproducibility between different laboratories.
a) Effects of the wave length of the filter and that of magnification of lens combination.
b) Statistical analyses for the results of the interlaboratory experiment held by the Japan National Committee for ISO/TC 27.
c) Statistical analyses for the results of the interlaboratory experiment held by the International Committee for Coal Petrology.
d) Theoretical considerations on the nos. of sample particle used for the petro-graphic analysis.
Informations obtained from the above studies are as follows:
1) Mean max. reflectance
i) The wave length of 525 nm results significant higher value (0.05-0.08) than that of 546 nm.
ii) The magnification of 600 x results higher value (about 0.04) than that of 250 x.
iii) Tolerances (Pr. 95%) calculated form the interlaboratory experiment are as follows:
within same lab.………0.03-0.04
Between diff. lab.……0.07-0.15
2) Maceral analysis
i) Precisions of maceral analysis are generally insufficient except Vt-group.The coefficients of variation (σ/
x×100) for Ex.-group and In.-group frequently reaches 20-100%.
ii) One of the reason of these unpreciseness is considered as the less nos. of the sample particle tested.
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