Dust emission from wet, low-emission coke quenching process

Abstract

Coke plants, which produce various types of coke (metallurgical, foundry or heating), at temperatures between 600 and 1200°C, with limited access to oxygen, are major emitters of particulates and gaseous pollutants to air, water and soils. Primarily, the process of wet quenching should be mentioned, as one of the most cumbersome. Atmospheric pollutants include particulates, tar substances, organic pollutants including B(a)P and many others. Pollutants are also formed from the decomposition of water used to quench coke (CO, phenol, HCN, H2S, NH3, cresol) and decomposition of hot coke in the first phase of quenching (CO, H2S, SO2) [1]. The development of the coke oven technology has resulted in the changes made to different types of technological installations, such as the use of baffles in quench towers, the removal of nitrogen oxides by selective NOx reduction, and the introduction of fabric filters for particulates removal. The BAT conclusions for coke plants [2] provide a methodology for the measurement of particulate emission from a wet, low-emission technology using Mohrhauer probes. The conclusions define the emission level for wet quenching process as 25 g/Mgcoke. The conducted research was aimed at verification of the presented method. For two of three quench towers (A and C) the requirements included in the BAT conclusions are not met and emissions amount to 87.34 and 61.35 g/Mgcoke respectively. The lowest particulates emission was recorded on the quench tower B and amounted to 22.5 g/Mgcoke, therefore not exceeding the requirements.