Characterisation of the microscopic structure of coal is fundamental to understanding its chemical and physical behaviour. The highly heterogeneous nature of coal and the fact that the characteristics and relative distributions of the different material constituents of this resource will determine its rank and quality, make a deep understanding of the composition of each grain critical. Analysis of coal samples allows benchmarking of potential
The software we developed allows the automatic analysis of large coal images which provide reliable statistics on the distribution of coal types and impurities. It has been successfully used to analyse hundreds of coal samples and is now commercially available.
