Technical Note - Apparatus For Testing Coal Sedimentation

Most previous work on sedimentation of coal1 and mineral2,3 suspensions has been conducted in graduated 1-liter glass cylinders of 6-cm diam. With this type of large container it is often difficult to see through the suspension and tedious to perform a large number of tests. Furthermore, the heavy glass walls and the graduation lines of glass cylinders cause internal and stray reflections, respectively. To obviate these difficulties, an Atlab Emulsion Viewer from Arthur H. Thomas Co. was adopted as an alternative apparatus. Equipment: The viewer,4 shown in Fig. 1, consists of: 1) a stainless steel frame rack holding 21 flat-bottom Nessler tubes or an ungraduated replica 1.64 cm ID and 1.80 cm OD, 2) a movable masked 150-w lumaline lamp behind the tubes, and 3) a scaled glass panel with 100 vertical divisions in front of the tubes. The tubes are snugly held by springs in slots formed by spacer bars, which also serve as shields to eliminate stray light. The lumaline lamp is mounted behind a slit in a movable housing so that it can be positioned behind the suspension to be examined. The lowest or 100-division line on the front glass plate is leveled with the upper side of the bottom of all tubes. The scaled portion of each tube, roughly 19 cm high and 40 ml in volume, is used to study coal and mineral suspensions.