For the past decades the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) technology has gained acceptance as a petrophysical tool for evaluating reservoir properties. Comprehensive reservoir evaluation requires determination of irreducible fluids, movable fluids and permeability. Although the NMR petrophysical properties of coals have been studied for decades, the impact of heat on these properties (pore size distribution, pore structures, porosity and permeability) has not yet been systematically investigated. However, these are key properties for coalbed methane (CBM) generation and production. Therefore, they may have significant implications for the effects of heat from geothermal dynamics and magma intrusion on CBM concentration and transport in coals with different ranks. Thus, NMR experiments for samples treated at different temperatures (from 25 degrees C to 375 degrees C) were designed to study the variation of petrophysical properties of three Chinese coal cores with different ranks. Results show that NMR transverse relaxation (T-2) distributions of the water saturated cores strongly relate to the coal pore structure and coal rank. Furthermore, based on T-2 cutoff time method, five models for calculating the permeability of coals to water were evaluated. The results show that the Schlumberger Doll Research (SDR) model and its improved model provided the best estimation among the five models because these two models are generally able to represent the matrix permeability of the coal, based on the comparison between the results from measured gas permeability and NMR permeability models. Further calculations indicate that the porosity of all three different rank coals have an increasing trend with exposure to temperature, but with different increments for these coals. The low-volatile bituminous coal has the largest increment (9.44%), which is an improvement of more than 200% from its original porosity (4.02%). While the permeability has no similar trend for these three rank coals after heat treatment due to the strong heterogeneity of pore structure in coals. The results may suggest complex microfractures widths change for forming/closing at different heating stages. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.