CO2 emission of coal spontaneous combustion and its relation with coal microstructure, China

Coal spontaneous combustion is widely distributed all over the world. CO2 is the main greenhouse gas emitted by coal spontaneous combustion. In the present study characters of CO2 emitted by 10 typical Chinese coal spontaneous combustion and the influence of raw coal functional group on CO2 was studied. CO2 already exists under normal temperature as coal exposed in atmosphere. Under low temperature, the quality of CO2 released by coal spontaneous combustion is relatively small, but tends to increase. And corresponding with it, the oxygen consumption amount is also small. At medium temperature, the oxygen consumption increases rapidly and CO2 mass release rate begins to increase rapidly. Then, CO2 release rate increase rapidly under relatively high temperature (higher than 673 K). Over 873K, concentration of O2 is 6% and release rate of CO2 tends to be steady. It also concluded that mass ratio of CO to CO2 (CO/CO2) during coal spontaneous combustion was lowerthan 0.10 at low temperature. And then, it increased rapidly at medium temperature and reached to top at about 673 K. At 673-873 K, the ratio decreased again, and did not decrease evidently at about 873K. At temperature higher than 873K, the ratio was about 0.13. During the whole testing temperature range, CO/CO2 was not be higher than 0.26, lower than 0.2. This means that release rate of CO2 was much higher than CO during the whole process of coal spontaneous combustion. Moreover, the gas release quantity of CO2 is positively related with carbony content in raw coal. Carbonyl and carboxyl were both material basis of CO2.