Coal Sample Bank

The Penn State Coal Sample Bank contains samples collected either by Penn State sampling crews or by crews from other agencies following Penn State prescribed procedures. Of over 1400 samples collected since 1967, over 1100 are still available for distribution, and data for all samples are available from the Penn State Coal Database. These are the PSOC- series samples used worldwide and frequently cited in research papers. Samples are generally distributed in 300 g, 2.5 kg or 12 kg quantities.

The newest and best preserved samples, in the DECS- series, are stored in argon in foil/polyethylene laminate bags under refrigeration, and are part of the Penn State Coal Sample Bank and Database.

A searchable subset of the Penn State Coal Database is available here. This WWW implementation contains five hundred seventy-eight whole-seam, working-section and run-of-mine samples with a basic set of analyses selected from the 1468 samples in the full Database. It includes the DECS samples from the U.S. Department of Energy database. Thirty-one of the most important descriptive and analytical values were chosen from among the 447 available data fields. The other samples and data fields in the full database can be accessed, and subsamples can be acquired, through COPL.