A NOVEL TRIAXIAL APPARATUS TO EVALUATE THE EFFECT OF HIGH TEMPERATURE NITROGEN INJECTION Concept and Design.

High temperature nitrogen, injection into coal seams is supposed to improve the permeability and thus maintain the safety of underground mining. A novel triaxial apparatus is recently developed, aiming at providing the effective method to evaluate the effect of high temperature nitrogen injection. The main feature of this novel apparatus is its high confining pressure, gas injection with high pressure as well as the high temperature. This new device can be either used for natural coal samples (e.g. intact or fractured) or the synthetic coal samples. A series of leakage tests were conducted to verify the feasibility of this instrument, the results of which have confirmed that the maximum pressure (i.e. 10 MPa) can be reached. In addition, the high temperature and pressure of nitrogen gas can also be sustain at the requested level. Based on the preliminary tests on the instrument, a large amount of tests were carried out to evaluate the effect of nitrogen injection in enhancing the permeability of coking coal from the Pingdingshan coalfield, China, and the influence of high temperature nitrogen injection on mechanical parameters of coal was obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]