A typical process used in Chinese metallurgical coal preparation plants employs heavy-media separation to treat the coal coarser than 0.5 mm. The (-)0.5 min fine coal is treated with froth flotation. A major disadvantage of this process is that a large quantity of fine coal is recycled in the heavy-media cyclone circuit, which results in high magnetite losses. The -0.5 turn fine coal in the media is a result of poor raw coal deslime screen efficiency and the continuous breakage associated with the processing of soft coal. Another disadvantage of this typical process is that some coarse clean coal particles are lost to the froth flotation tailings. This investigation focuses on the simulation of processing fine soft coal with water-only cyclone (WOC) and spirals. WOCs and spirals have become popular devices for treating fine coal. WOCs can operate at low specific gravity cut points to produce low ash clean coal while spirals tends to operate at high specific gravity cut points and act as a scavenger to rewash the underflow (refuse) from WOCs. The combination of WOCs and spirals can compete with a heavy-media cyclone with respect to both efficiency and clean coal yield when treating 1 min x 100 Mesh fine coal. This fine coal processing circuit can subsequently increase the bottom size of the heavy-media cyclone feed from 0.5 mm to I mm which will reduce the loading of the heavy-media cyclone circuit. This change in circuitry thus reduces magnetite consumption without scarifying separation efficiency of the 1 mm x 0 size fraction. Furthermore, the reduction of the nominal top size of the froth flotation feed from 0.5 mm to 0.15 mm will greatly decrease or eliminate the loss of clean coal to flotation tailings. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.