Abstract:
C
2H
2 and C
2H
6 are common indicator gases for spontaneous combustion, which are widely used to assist the judgment and early warning of residual coal spontaneous combustion in goaf, and also serve as important criteria for identifying the accelerated oxidation stage of coal spontaneous combustion. To clarify the generation laws and adsorption characteristics of C
2H
2 and C
2H
6 during coal spontaneous combustion and remedy the insufficient microscopic research on this issue in previous studies, three macromolecular coal models with different metamorphic degrees (YM anthracite, Wiser bituminous, and Wolfrum lignite) were constructed. The generation laws, adsorption capacities, and characteristics of dominant adsorption functional groups of C
2H
2 and C
2H
6 during the oxidation and pyrolysis of coal molecules were investigated using ReaxFF reactive force field, molecular dynamics (MD), and grand canonical Monte Carlo (GCMC) methods. The results show that the generation amount of C
2H
2 during spontaneous combustion pyrolysis is obviously higher and its generation time is obviously earlier than that during the oxidation process. Under the same conditions, the gas generation amount follows the order: lignite > bituminous coal > anthracite. The generation amount of C
2H
6 is very small under both oxidation and pyrolysis conditions, indicating that the release of C
2H
6 in the early stage of spontaneous combustion mostly originates from the primary existing gas in coal. The limiting adsorption heats of C
2H
2 and C
2H
6 in all models are less than 42 kJ/mol, belonging to physical adsorption. The saturated adsorption capacity ranges of C
2H
2 and C
2H
6 in competitive adsorption are 1.1-2.7 mmol/g and 0.4-1.1 mmol/g, respectively. C
2H
2 has an absolute competitive adsorption advantage over C
2H
6, and the anthracite model exhibits stronger gas adsorption capacity than other low-rank coal models. The main adsorption sites of C
2H
2 and C
2H
6 are distributed in the intermolecular cavities of coal molecules inside the unit cell, close to oxygen-containing functional group structures. C
2H
2 has high interaction energy with carboxyl and carbonyl groups, while C
2H
6 has higher interaction energy with carbonyl and alcoholic hydroxyl groups, and also shows strong adsorption binding ability to phenol structures.