Abstract:Spontaneous combustion is one of the serious problems in the mining of sulfide ore deposits. The relevant factors, e.g. oxygen absorption quantity, mass increase, contents of water soluble iron ions and sulfate ion of sulfide ore samples in the oxidation process were investigated both in theory and experiment. The results from the investigation show that there is no general interpretation relation among the oxygen absorption quantity, the contents of sulfate ion and water soluble iron ions during the oxidation process of sulfide ores at ambient temperature. However, there is a linear relationship between the mass increase of the sulfide ore samples in the oxidation process at ambient temperature and the quantity of oxygen absorption. Therefore, the simple and cheap mass scaling method is suitable for predicting the oxygen absorption performance of sulfide ores at ambient temperature in place of the expensive and complicated chemical method used hitherto. Furthermore, combined with other items of breeding-fire test, the mass increase potential can also be used to predict the spontaneous combustion tendency of sulfide ores.

Key words: sulfide ore; oxidation absorption; oxidization products; spontaneous combustion; mass increase scaling method; combustion prediction