Power Consumption of Various Pulverizers in Power Plant

The reason for having to use a beater mill is that lignite is a mixture of biomass that 's been partly carbonized ('coalified'), partly turned to hydrocarbons, and partly still 'original form' biomass. Because of this, depending on the type of lignite, various operations have to be done on it to make it usable; that's especially the case for the 'original form' biomass part.

If lignite's to be burnt using lignite-coal guns, it has to be reduced to particles fine enough for full (enough) combustion, meaning that the biomass part of lignite has to be shredded, reduced to small pieces, etc, where 'hard' coal like anthracite just needs to be crushed to form particles. Hence why lignite has to be reduced to particles using a process other than just crushing ... the biomass part requires it.

The same thing crops up when someone tries to mix biomass into coal as a fuel substitute. For example, so far, very low percentages of wood biomass (I've read of 3%) can be mixed as-is into coal because of the biomass' mechanical properties; it's hard to reduce wood fibres to very VERY small particles, which means that too much biomass gums up coal burners, forms soot, etc.

By the way, the solution to the above: torrefy (char) the biomass. ;-) That turns it into pure carbonthat can be crushed and mixed with coal. Then the problem becomes the fact thatthe torrefied biomass has a very high caloric value, somewhat higher than the very best anthracite (hard) coal. No pollutants (sulfur, heavy metals) and smoke-free combustion too.

Cheers! DZ