A Study of Susceptibility of Indian Coals to Spontaneous Combustion and its Correlation with their Intrinsic Properties

Coal mine fire is a major problem in Indian mining industry. These fires are mostly attributed to spontaneous combustion. In order to find out the susceptibility of coal to spontaneous combustion, a study has been carried out to determine the intrinsic properties of coal by carrying out proximate, ultimate, petrographic and other analyses of a number of coal samples collected from different Indian coalfields. Simultaneously, the susceptibility of these samples to spontaneous heating has been determined by crossing point temperature analysis. In addition, some other characteristics of coal samples, viz. porosity and inorganic elements (Ca, Mg and Fe), have been determined by performing different experiments. Rigorous statistical analyses have been carried out to correlate the crossing point temperature with different intrinsic properties of coal. The statistical analysis indicates that there is a good correlation between crossing point temperature, and the constituents of proximate analysis and porosity of coal samples. The paper presents the details of the above experiments and the findings of this work.