As a non-renewable national strategic resource,coal is still one of the most important basic energy resources in the world. Low quality coal has considerable potential reserves and has become an indispensable energy resource for energy security in China. Coal preparation is the source technology to realize efficient and clean utilization of coal. The traditional wet coal preparation technology strongly depends on water resources. Due to the characteristics of no water,low cost and no pollution,the dry coal preparation technology has provides an effective method for clean and efficient separation and industrial transformation and development of coal resources. The working principle,research status and industrial application progress of air separation,compound dry coal separator,photoelectric separation technology,dry dense medium coal separation technology were analyzed in detail,then the progress of dry coal separation technology at home and abroad was summarized. Based on understanding the progress of the above separation technologies,the limitations of the existing dry separation technologies were pointed out,such as narrow feed size,high water requirement and low intelligence. Then the development trend of coal dry separation technologies was prospected,and the next research focus was pointed out,including breaking through the theoretical bottleneck of fine coal separation and realizing dry separation of whole-grain coal,developing efficient coal separation and drying collaborative technology and solving the problem of water limitation of raw coal,speeding up the research of dry precision separation technology and saving the processing cost of high-quality coal,such as coking coal,carrying out up-scale theoretical research on the separator and realizing the up-grade of the separator,coal-series associated minerals and coal-series solid waste resource utilization,etc.,so as to provide the possible suggestions for the research of dry coal separation technology in future.