Updating “Characteristics of respirable dust in eight Appalachian coal mines: A dataset including particle size and mineralogy distributions, and metal and trace element mass concentrations” with expanded data to cover a total of 25 US mines()

A total of 171 sets respirable dust samples were collected from 25 underground coal mines in several regions of the United States. One sample from each set was analyzed by scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM-EDX) to determine particle size and mineralogy distributions. Results from the first eight mines were presented in the original dataset (Sarver et al., 2019). Here, the dataset is updated to include results from all 25 mines and to further subclassify particle mineralogy using improved SEM-EDX routines. The current article presents particle mineralogy binned by size between about 100–10,000 nm on a per sample basis, and data is also available on a per particle basis. Discussion of the SEM-EDX data is included in a parallel research article “Particle size and mineralogy distributions in respirable dust samples from 25 US underground coal mines” (Sarver et al., 2021). Moreover, sequential digestions and analysis of the digestates by inductively coupled plasma-mass spectroscopy (ICP-MS) were used to estimate mass concentrations of potentially bioaccessible and total-acid soluble metals and trace elements in the respirable dust samples. Results are included here for a total of 76 samples representing 15 mines; results from first eight mines were presented in the original dataset (Sarver et al., 2019) and discussed in an earlier research article (Sarver et al., 2019).