A New Prototype Design and Experimental Study for Assessing Spontaneous Coal Combustion

Abstract

This present study contribute to provide a simple technology to early detect the phenomenon of spontaneous coal combustion. A new prototype is designated to detect the CO gas formation as a product of initial coal oxidation. Moreover, several parameters including coal quality, coal weight sample, ambient temperature, and air flow were employed to investigate the effects of each parameter to the CO formation time. The results show that the coal characterisation have a significant effect in the CO formation time where the coal having a higher fixed carbon and high gross calorific values provide the high liability of spontaneous coal combustion. However, these finding only occurred in low weight sample where in the high coal weight sample only fixed carbon plays the main role in determining the CO formation time. Furthermore, the prototype ambient temperature become the important parameter in the boosting of CO formation time where airflow only enhance the CO formation time in low temperature condition (below 29°C). Moreover, these findings opens a new sight in coal management, especially in Indonesia, where controlling the coal and atmosphere temperature could effectively prevent the spontaneous coal combustion especially in coal stockpile. Nevertheless, the other factor including airflow and coal weight sample also need perfect controlling because all of these factors potentially create a perfect environment to combust the coal spontaneously.