Spontaneous Combustion Tendency of Sulfide Ores: A Perspective from TPO Data and Adsorption Properties

Abstract

A proper understanding of spontaneous oxidation and combustion tendency of sulfide ores is of great importance for the assessment and mitigation of possible spontaneous mine fire in practice. Series of test study for typical sulfide ores under temperature programmed oxidation (TPO) conditions were presented in this conference paper, with the aim of correlating the spontaneous combustion tendency and the measurements of total oxygen uptake and starting temperature of self-heating. Also relevant nitrogen adsorption properties, including specific surface area and pore- size distributions, for the same set of sulfide ore samples were determined using the Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) method and the Barret-Joyner-Hallender (BJH) method, respectively. The test results demonstrate that for the sulfide ore samples collected from a spontaneously combusting mine, The total consumptions of oxygen during TPO test were relatively larger in comparison with those sample from a mine without spontaneous fire record in history. Also it is shown that the microstructural surface features of the ore samples may have an effect on the oxygen consumption response during TPO test.