Experimental Study on Pore Structure and Gas Desorption Characteristics of a Low Rank Coal: Impact of Moisture

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.