On the measurment of specific energy of coals by means of 12C determination using a correlation method

The most important industrial property of coal is its gross specific energy (combustion heat). It depends mainly on carbon concentration in coal. We propose to measure the carbon or more precisely, its 12C content using the (n,n'γ) reaction in which 4.43 MeV gamma rays are emitted. We are using the correlation technique which can be used in high background measurements. The idea of correlation type measurement necessitates the existence of a reaction chain with primary and secondary radiations emitted and registered. By measuring the correlation or covariance function PHI we can obtain a measure of the number of excited 12C nuclei i.e. a value which is connected to the carbon concentration. The dependence of PHI/t ratio (t being the sampling interval time) on carbon concentration shows a clear increase of the PHI/t value with carbon content. The relative standard deviations for different points vary from 1.3 to 4.4%. The preliminary results presented show that with improved experimental techniques this method can find application in industrial coal cobustion heat measurements. (author)