AN INVESTIGATION TO OPTIMISE THE EXPERIMENTAL PARAMETERS OF DIFFERENTIAL SCANNING CALORIMETRY METHOD TO PREDICT THE SUSCEPTIBILITY OF COAL TO SPONTANEOUS HEATING

Researchers all over the world have attempted to study spontaneous heating susceptibility of coal by different methods. Amongst all these methods, thermal studies have been widely applied. There are many techniques used in thermal studies of coal and these are differential thermal analysis, differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), crossing point temperature, modifi ed crossing point temperature, puff temperature, initial temperature determination, Russian method, H2O2 method, Olpinski index and adiabatic calorimetry. It may be mentioned here that amongst these techniques DSC has been found to be more sophisticated and it gives reproducible results under similar experimental conditions. These experimental conditions are atmosphere of heating, sample size, heating rates, fl ow rates of carrier gas and amount of sample. However, different researchers all over the world have used different experimental conditions and got different results. These results cannot be comparable. As a result the mine planners and practicing engineers are not in a position to apply these results for planning and operating the mines. Therefore, the authors have carried out 84 numbers of DSC experiments to optimise these experimental conditions, so that it can be uniformly applied for comparing the proneness of coal to spontaneous heating. The outcome of the study will be useful by the mine planners and practicing engineers to take ameliorative measures in advance to prevent the occurrence of coal mine fire