Coal homogenization

[1] The reclaimed heap would then typically have a weighted average output quality of the input sources.

Mixing is defined as a random rearrangement of particles by means of mechanical energy, e.g. rotary devices, in a fixed volume.

Intermediate storage facilities (for example stockpiles) are required to decouple the (discontinuous) supply of raw materials from the (continuous) production process.

This means that processes using these raw materials have to deal with these fluctuations in order to produce products with a constant quality.

Stacking the layers on each other ensures that the variance in input quality is reduced once the coal is reclaimed in a vertical cross-section.

In a simplified form, the effectiveness of the homogenization process is represented by E, the homogenization effect: In practice, varying stockpile layer thickness, type of stacking and different reclaiming methods makes the above formulae of little use.