Water saturation of coal samples during long-term impregnation

The paper investigates applicability of two mathematical models developed by the authors for calculating the process of long-term impregnation of coal samples. A distinctive feature of the studied samples is low porosity. Considered models are based on single- and three-channel representation of the internal structure of a porous medium. These models were previously used to study the process of long-term impregnation of highly porous materials. At the same time, the three-channel model in most cases showed much better agreement with experimental data. This study revealed some features of these models associated with approximation of the experimental data obtained for the low porous samples. These features consist in the presence of rather small (in some cases) errors in the processing of experimental points by means of single-channel model. At the same time, the refinements obtained by means of multi-channel model cause only slight error decrease. The results suggest that the channel distributions along the radial direction of the investigated coal samples are narrow and have a pronounced peaks close to the obtained average values.