Study on the kinetic characteristics and control steps of gas production in coal spontaneous combustion under the oxidation path

The low-temperature oxidation of coal involves multiple gas production paths including desorption, pyrolysis and oxidation. These paths interfere with each other, resulting in unclear kinetic characteristics of CO and CO2 production in coal oxidation and incomplete mechanism of gas production. Therefore, this paper proposed a method that can effectively exclude the effects of desorption and pyrolysis on gas production and adopted this method to explore the kinetic characteristics of CO and CO2 production under different paths. Besides, with the aid of microscopic characterization methods, the kinetic steps controlling gas production and the mechanism of gas production were analyzed. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively eliminate the effects of desorption and pyrolysis, and can obtain the kinetic characteristics of gas production under the oxidation path that can reflect the intrinsic characteristics of low-temperature oxidation of coal. Based on the difference method, the activation energies of CO and CO2 produced under the oxidation path are 59.49 kJ/mol and 60.09 kJ/mol, which activation energies are almost the same, suggesting that CO and CO2 are likely to be produced from the same precursor. The gas production in low-temperature oxidation is a process in which methylene groups in coal react with oxygen to generate oxygen-containing intermediates which then decompose to produce CO and CO2. The reaction of methylene groups with oxygen is the control step of gas production kinetics in coal spontaneous combustion, resulting in the same apparent activation energies of CO and CO2 production in the stable phase under the oxidation path.