Evaluation of the steady-state coal permeability experiments: a numerical simulation study

By using the numerical simulator developed in our previous work, this paper conducted four simulation cases on the steady-state coal permeability experiments. One case is not backpressure-regulated and the other three are backpressure-regulated with different constant differential pressures between the upstream and the downstream end. The simulation results indicate that the backpressure-regulated steady-state method is superior to the non-backpressure-regulated in terms of the measurement accuracy. The results also indicate that a small differential pressure may be preferable to a higher value for the backpressure-regulated method in order to obtain more accurate permeability measurements. These conclusions may be meaningful for future coal permeability measurements with the steady-state method.