Spontaneous combustion identification of stored wet cotton using a C80 calorimeter

Many cotton fires were caused by spontaneous combustion, to identify the possible cause of such fires, a C80 microcalorimeter was employed in this paper. The cotton samples, dry or wetted, were sealed and heated from ambient temperature to 300 °C at a 0.2 °C min⁻¹ heating rate. The result indicated that the dry cotton may not be the self-heating materials, but once it is wetted, its thermal stability is decreased with lower onset temperature and with larger heat generation, which can result to spontaneous combustion. It is speculated that microbiological degradation of cotton fibers has the potential to evolve methane and/or oxygen that in vapor phase could lead to spontaneous combustion. And therefore, it is confirmed that C80 can be used as an effective instrument to identify the cause of cotton spontaneous combustion fire.