I was wondering because it has been raining all day. The Coal train that passes my house has been going in and out of the Power Plant. What does a Power Plant do when the coal it gets in wet? Do they just burn the coal and don’t care about the water?
Thanks,
Dustin
most coal starts the trip - right out of the ground with considerable water in it. In the case of Powder River Basin coal - it is about 10% by weight of water - so a little extra from rain will not have much effect. Burners are already designed to handle the water load.
There was an earlier thread on rain on wood chips that has some interesting, related information.
dd
Coal cars have small drain holes at the point base of the car allowing water to drain out.
At one power plant we go to they have a huge dryer that hels in the burning process.
loaded coal cars + rain = nothing
the rain water has little to no affect on the car weigth
csx engineer
If the coal does not dry out before it reaches the steam generator, then the plant will have to burn a little bit more coal because some of the heat will go to heating the extra water in the coal.
Yeah so, not that big of a deal…now soybeans…LOL.
Has anyone determined the actual weight that rain water adds to a load of coal? I have had some trains done to tenths of a mph and the extra weight in 130 cars might be the difference between making the hill or having to double it.
Really fine slack coal absorbs water like a sponge.
Years ago N&W was having trouble with hotboxes on trains off the Clinch Valley District. Hating hotboxes like original sin, the railroad needed to find out why. They weighed at Bluefield a 50-ton hopper loaded with wet slack and a 70-ton hopper loaded the same way. The 50-tonner’s load weighed nearly 70 tons and the 70-tonner’s load almost 100 tons. Ordinarily, these cars were not weighed until much farther down the road.
I don’t know what measures were taken, but at least they found out the reason . . .
Old Timer
How is the coal sold-by weight? When I was a kid ( a long time ago it seems) the Milwaukee Road would truck bentonite from Colony Wyo. to Murphy Siding (of all places!), then load it into gondolas with a front end loader. I always wondered how they could haul it in the open? It doesn’t take much water to turn bentonite into expanding bear grease.
Canadian Pacific installed a sprinkler system at Notch Hill, British Columbia to pour water on the coal during dry weather to fight coal dust.
hey mark… sure it wasnt the wet rails that killed it…lol
see you friday
csx engineer
Coal and rain water does have one major side effect. All coal contains some sulfur, Powder River coal just has less than Midwestern and Appalachian coal. The rain water reacts with the sulfur to make a weak solution of sulfuric acid, which can have the expected results on the carbody.
Old Timer - Lovely stuff, slack.
Back in the day, some prep plants had thermal dryers that were used to dry coal b4 shipment. Many of these beasts used furnaces powered by pulverized coal. I never liked being around them a whole lot.
work safe
Dust Control! (Once the Powder River coal gets out on the flats, you can see the coal dust blowing out of the top of the hoppers.)
A big pain if it’s winter and it freezes before dumping…
Back in the late 1990’s, a local pulp mill was given permission by the EPA to test burn some high grade East Coast coal in thier wood waste energy system. This was in early spring, and though the weather at the pulp mill was warm and mild, the car sets of coal had apparently traversed a Midwest downpour, followed by a haul through a Montana late freeze. By the time the carsets arrived, the coal was frozen solid, and it took numerous plant workers to chip away at the coal and get the frozen blobs down to grate size. That one experience caused the pulp mill managers to avow that they would never again try that experiment. As far as I know, they have never tried coal co-firing since then.
While at Old Ben Coal, I had oversight of the use of anti freeze added to the coal at loading to mitigate the problem of coal freezing in the hopper bottoms. Was out of the office on another mission when my boss OK’d a shipment without antifreez from a southern Illinois mine to a power plant in Iowa. It was during a late February thaw, it rained during the loading of the train and then turned bitter cold. About two weeks later, I hired an excavating contractor to bring in a clam shovel to unload coal from as far into the hopper bottom as he could reach without damaging the car. Then the car was put into an unused engine house, where the heat in the building could thaw out the car. The BN gave us a big detention bill. I am not sure if it was ever paid.
Coal from our two open pit mines in Indiana would soak up rainwater. That would always cause some contorversy with our friends at the Southern Company (Georgia Power, among others) on the subject of moisture content being over spec.
I figure a inch of rain would put about 30 cubic feet of water in a coal car. Forgot the weight of a cu ft of water so I can’t come up with the total weight.
Jay
Thanks for the responses!!!
Dustin
Not much when it is warm, but in the winter the water adds some weight to the train when it frozen i.e. about a 2" layer of ice on the coal.
Rodney