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Show The intent of the program is to conduct only the levels of evaluation necessary to ascertain the expected combustion performance of the as-produced fuels and any product der i vatives, such as coal-water mixtures. Many of the fuels will be subjected only to low-level evaluations to verify expected performance levels; however, other fuels will be evaluated by all available means to more precisely assess their commercial value. INITIAL RESULTS Although first-year efforts have centered on the design and construction of the Fuels Evaluation Facility, a multilevel evaluation of two chemically cleaned coals has been completed and evaluation of three physically cleaned coals is under way. The AMAX Research and Development Center, under contract to PETC, produced 600-lb batch samples of Molten Caustic Leach (MCL)treated Pittsburgh No.8 and Kentucky No. 11 seam coals. The parent coals were treated with a 1:1 mixture of NaOH and KOH at a 5:1 ratio of caustic to coal for 4 hours at 3900 C. The caustic-leaching step was followed by water washing and filtration, acid washing and filtration, and a final waterleaching step to remove any remaining alkali. Pi ttsburgh No.8, Illinois No.6, and Upper Freeport seam coals were cleaned by Bechtel National, Inc. 's advanced microbubble flotation (AMF) process at the Electric Power Research Institute's (EPRI) Coal Quality Development Center (CQDC). Microbubble :flotation is a physical coal-cleaning technology wherein finely ground «44-micron) coal and mineral matter are separated -in a water column by bubbles, less than 100 microns in diameter, created by air injection. By highlighting some results of these initial evaluations, this paper will show the range of fuel quality that the advanced coal preparation processes can produce and will begin to demonstrate to potential users that BCF can be burned efficiently while achieving cost-effective emissions control. Molten Caustic Leached Coals As shown by the Level 1 results in Table 1, MCL treatment of the parent coals, Pittsburgh No. 8 and Ken tucky No. 11, resul ted in greater than 96% reduction in ash content on a dry basis. Compliance fuels were produced by MCL-treatment of the Pittsburgh No.8 and Kentucky No. 11 seam coals, as their total sulfur contents on a dry basis were reduced by 87% and 97%, respectively. Also, the significant differences in the ni trogen, oxygen, and hydrogen contents of the MCL products should be noted. With approximately 50% of the volatile matter of their parent coals, the MCL products may be significantly more difficult to ignite and burn out. Coals with less than 20% to 25% volatile matter have presented combustibility problems in commercial practice. The ratio of fixed carbon to volatile matter (FC/VM) is generally used to predict flame stability for low-volatile coals, with values >2 indicating possible problems with ignition and flame stability. The FC/VM ratios of the Pi ttsburgh No. 8 and Kentucky No. 11 parent coals are 1.18 and 1.25, respectively, indicating acceptable performance. With FC/VM ratios of 3.63 and 3.59, ignition difficulties would be expected for the Pi ttsburgh No. 8 and Kentucky No. 11 MCL products. In addition to the reduction in the amount of volatile matter, the composition of the remaining volatile matter was changed. Table 2 shows the molecular |