Recovery of cenosphere from fly ash / Nur Ain Sumari

All power plants that are generating electricity from coal have huge amount of fly ash abandoned per day. The combustion residual disposed without any recovery could lead to environmental concern due to the high contents of metals. From this project, fly ash sample obtained from Kapar Power Plant was investigated to identify the amount of cenospheres composition. Cenospheres are in hollow spheres and can be obtained about 2 % from the fly ash sample. The purpose of this project is to recover cenopshere from fly ash by using one of wet separation method which is float sink test. This test yields an amount of cenosphere due to the water density that is less than 1 g/cm3. The floated particle which is cenosphere and fly ash are sedimented. Portion of recovered cenosphere and fly ash were analysed in term of their particle size distribution by using particle size analyser. Regarding the process, there are justification between the properties of fly ash and recovered cenosphere of the same sample fly ash. Regarding the process, there is correlation between particle size distribution with application of cenosphere. The distribution happened on range size of 20 to 40 µm for each particular sample of fly ash and cenosphere. The size of particle distribution of cenosphere is much higher than fly ash. This result was proved by previous researcher which explained that cenosphere is a hollow particle that consists of 0.01mm to 1mm in diameter. The cenosphere can only be constituted about 1 to 2% of the fly ash obtained from the coal combustion process. Regarding to this research, 90% of the cenospheres have diameters between 0.1 to 0.42mm while the remaining of 10% have diameters lower than 0.1mm.