Goal of the Joint Coal Fire Research Project

The overall goal of the joint coal fire research project is, to fully understand the processes leading to and influencing the development of coal seam fires in China. This basic scientific understanding shall support the development of methods to assess the geometry of coal fires, detect new coal fires and monitor coal fires on a timely basis over several years or decades. The final task resulting form the gain of knowledge will be the extinction of known and newly detected fires. Therefore, the joint coal fire research project contains several small goals, which can be classified depending on their thematic field.

Understand the processes, which lead to coal fires:

• understand the process of spontaneous combustion, modelling the process
• understand the influences accelerating spontaneous combustion (geophysical parameters)
• understand the influence of men and investigate the relationship between new coal fire occurrence and anthropogenic interaction
• understand the proneness of different types of coal towards self ignition

Understand and model the geometry as well as spreading of (subsurface) coal fires:

• measure and model how fast coal fires spread depending on bedrock, depth, aeration, coal type, rainfall and other geophysical parameters
• understand the transfer of heat and the flux of gasses depending on bedrock, porosity, cracks, layering density etc.
• classify the coal fires into fast-moving, slow-moving, stable and retreating coal fires
• understand the parameters which influence the coal fire geometry and model them

Develop and study innovative extinguishing method:

• recommendations on which extinguishing method/ extinguishing material should be used at which location, application of these methods to put out the major coal fires
• model the process of extinguishing and their long term effect
• model the process and probability of re-ignition extinguish as many coal fires as possible

Understand and quantify the local, regional and possibly global environmental influences of coal fires:

• Investigate, which and what quantity of (toxic and green-house relevant) gasses are being released by coal fires and assess their quantity
• Investigate which and what quantity of solid compounds are released be coal fires
• Understand how coal fires affect the local population (influence on water supply, food chain and immune system or illness)
• Model how much Carbon-dioxide, Methane and Nitrous oxides are being released by a certain amount of burning coal
• Model how different coal types and differing burning intensities influence the relevance of green-house relevant gasses

Long term monitoring of coal fires and survey of endangered areas:

• suggest safer operation methods for small and private mines in the mining areas to avoid coal fires
• derive improved coal fires prevention guidelines
• set up a coal fire database / warehouse with geo-data and trigger extinguishing procedures when new coal fires are being detected