AbstractThe generation of carbon fines by attrition during burning of Thai lignite char has been studied experimentally by means of a 92 mm i.d. continuous spouted bed combustor at different values of spouting gas velocity, bed temperature, and char feed size. Both inert particle size and static bed depth were fixed for all experimental runs. The collected data were used to analyse size distributions of both in‐bed particles and elutriated fines, and to generate the suitable correlations for carbon attrition rate. Results obtained showed that attrition rate in the spouted bed is proportional to the excess of gas velocity above the minimum spouting gas velocity and the overall bed carbon surface exposed to attrition. The attrition rate constant is slightly dependent on operating bed temperature. Its values for the char studied were 1.6511 × 10−6for 707°C operating bed temperature, and 1.1222 × 10−6for 850°C, with the average for all tested runs being 1.2