Transferred arc plasma processed mullite from coal ash and bauxite

Coal ash disposal is one of the main problems in thermal power plant unit. Currently, a number of waste management systems are being tried foreffective disposal of coal ash. In this paper, coal ash from thermal power plant unit was successfully utilized for synthesis of mullite ceramic byusing transferred arc plasma processing (TAP) technique. For this purpose, bauxite was added with coal ash by 0, 25, 50 and75 weight ratio. Thecompositions were thoroughly mixed by ball milling and were melted in the transferred arc plasma torch at 10 kW input power level for 3 min.Argon was used as plasma forming gas. The phase and microstructure formation of the melted samples were investigated by XRD and SEMimages. The results show that the additions of bauxite greatly influenced the phase formation of mullite during the processes.