Fire prevention and extinguishing technologies in coal spontaneous combustion: a bibliometric and systematic review

Coal spontaneous combustion (CSC) is a major issue in the coal mining industry and poses a significant threat to the safety of coal production. To address this problem, various technologies for CSC prevention and extinguishing have been developed. Despite this, a bibliometric and systematic review of CSC prevention and extinguishing technologies (PAETs) is currently lacking. To bridge this gap, a scientometric analysis of the bibliographic data in this field is conducted to identify current popular technologies and challenges, including statistics and analysis of the number of publications, institutions, journals, and research hotspots. Also, the paper divides CSC-PAET into two categories: wind flow control methods and fire prevention and extinguishing medias. It also provides detailed information on the research status, fire extinguishing principle, application effect, advantages, and disadvantages of each category. Finally, based on the findings and limitations of the published literature, this paper recommends that future research should focus on the microscopic mechanism of CSC reaction, strengthening the development of fire prevention and extinguishing medias and intelligent equipment, and realizing the dynamic identification, analysis and control of the whole mine fire prevention and extinguishing system, which is helpful for researchers and engineers in the field.