Prospective Utilization of Coal Fly Ash for Making Advanced Materials

Coal waste is a fine glass-like solid residue or by-product of the thermal power plant generally collected from the electrostatic precipitator (ESP-2) before flue gas reach out chimneys. As a consequence of time, the overall generation of coal fly ash (CFA) from different domains is being increased worldwide and becomes a very serious environmental issue on its disposal which creates direct effects on soil, air, and water. Though in most of all cases the coal waste (FA) is being used as a land filler for road making, which also causes a substantial threat for the environment owing to bearing toxic metals and other inorganic minerals in it. Therefore, researchers attempted to develop many methodologies for major utilization of these coal wastes after recovering metal values through a suitable leaching processing approach. The CFA resulted from thermal power plant act as the effective product and get attention as the potential raw materials having less harmful, less toxicity afterconverting it to valuable products or substitute raw materials to manufacture valuable products. Presently over 300 Million Tons of FA is being generated worldwide from the thermal plant sectors, but that accounts only about 10–30% of overall FA production is being used worldwide for developing valuable products. Due to the impactful conversion of coal waste to valuable products, environmental pollution is decreasing day-by-day. The various types of useful products from CFA have already been existed in global markets (like Cement, Bricks, and Tiles), and some are under developmental and experimental stages (Matrix membrane, Biodiesel production, lightweight wall element, and lathy tobermorite fiber).