Coal Handling Plant

Coal can be bought to the power plant via trucks or train or ship if power plant is located near sea.
The most common way to bring coal is by train.

Generally a railway track needs to be laid from the nearest railway station to the power plant. The train wagons are automatically unloaded using a wagon tippler mechanism and the unloaded coal is stored in an underground bunker. This coal is then conveyed to the crusher house using belt conveyor system. In the crusher house coal is crushed to around 25mm size. The crushed coal is then stored in coal stockyard using a mechanism called stacker-reclaimer. The coal is further conveyed to the ball mill via belt conveyor system. In the ball mill coal is pulverized to a powder form. This powder form is conveyed to the coal burners of the boiler using hot air which also dries the coal.

Generally speaking, about 0.5 T/hr of coal is required per MW unit size. So if you had a 200 MW unit, then 100 T/hr of coal would be required.

For 24 hours, you would need 2400 T of coal

One train carries appox 3000T. of coal. So 1 train of coal would be required to unloaded per day.