Controlling water temperature for efficient coal/gangue recognition

Coal and gangue (black-gray solid wastes in coal) recognition is vital to avoid waste of resources and pollution of the environment during the coal production. Considering their color/temperature is very close to each other, the traditional visible image and infrared image analyzing method is hard to obtain satisfied recognition efficiency. Therefore, a new idea of the ‘liquid intervention + infrared monitoring’ method was proposed to improve the recognition efficiency. In this article, the coal/gangue recognition experiments with different water temperatures were conducted, and the infrared thermal imager was used to record temperature variation after water intervention. The results show that when the water temperature is lower than the ambient temperature, the temperature difference between coal and gangue reaches the maximum value within 10 s, which is five times that without water intervention. The mean value of temperature difference between coal and gangue shows an approximate linear downward trend with the increasing of water temperature. The results indicate that under the condition of water intervention, it is recommended to choose water with a temperature below the ambient air, which may be a new approach to improve the coal/gangue recognition efficiency under different complex environments in underground coal mines.