Coal seam is a sedimentary body with complex pore system. The gas adsorption property of coal is greatly determined by the adsorption‐pores (<100 nm), and the fractal dimension can be used an index to estimate the impact of the adsorption‐pores on the methane adsorption capacity of various rank coals. In this paper, low‐temperature N2 adsorption and H2O adsorption methods were used to study the adsorption‐pores structure and its fractal features. The results show that the development of adsorption‐pores closely depends on the coalification, and the degree of pore development exhibits a U‐shaped trend with increasing coal rank. Additionally, the pore size distributions of coal samples from N2 adsorption analysis and H2O adsorption analysis are similar, especially for samples LH7 and WLH8. Fractal analysis indicates that D2(N2) (0.5 < P/P0 < 1) can more accurately characterize the fractal features of adsorption‐pores than D2(H2O), which may be a result of the significant coal‐H2O interaction. Moreover, D2(N2) has stronger correlations with the coal pore parameters. With the increase in D2(N2), the Langmuir volume first decreases and then increases, which is probably associated with the competition effect of the pore structure and surface irregularity of coal. When D2(N2) < 2.7‐2.8, the pore structure plays a key role, while for D2(N2) > 2.7‐2.8, the influence of the specific surface area is more prominent. The equilibrium moisture content of the coal samples also has a positive correlation with D2, except for low‐rank coal sample YZG2 due to the presence of a large amount of oxygen‐containing functional groups, which increases its water‐holding capacity.

No abstract

Coal and gas outburst is one of the most serious disasters for underground coal mining. The water adsorbed on coal can leads to that the pore structure of moist coal is different from that of dry coal, thereby affecting methane desorption characteristics of coal for the outburst risk prediction. In this paper, the impact of moisture on pore structure and methane desorption performance were investigated. The analysis on low-temperature nitrogen gas adsorption tests show that the micropores (pore diameter < 10 nm) are most affected by the adsorbed water. In particular, for water-equilibrated coal sample at 98% relatively humidity, the micropores less than 4 nm analyzed by DFT pore size distributions almost disappear probably due to the blocking effect of the formed water clusters and capillary water. In this case, the micropores can still contributes most sites for gas adsorption. Furthermore, the fractal dimension at relative pressure of 0–0.5 (D1) and 0.5–1 (D2) calculated by the Frenkel-Halsey-Hill model indicates that, when moisture content is less than 4.74%, D1 decreases rapidly while D2 shows a slight change; whereas, further increases in moisture content results in that D2 decreases significantly and D1 remains at about 2.32. Further investigation shows that, below the equilibrium moisture content, the ultimate desorption volume (A) and initial desorption rate (V0) are closely related to D1, while the desorption constant (Kt) mainly depends on D2. Therefore, the adsorbed moisture has significant negative impact on methane desorption performances by affecting characteristics of coal’s pores.