Scale Effect on the Anisotropy of Acoustic Emission in Coal

Abstract EN

Acoustic emission (AE) in coal is anisotropic.

In this paper, we investigate the microstructure-related scale effect on the anisotropic AE feature in coal at unconfined loading process.

A series of coal specimens were processed with diameters of 25 mm, 38 mm, 50 mm, and 75 mm (height to diameter ratio of 2) and anisotropic angles of 0°, 15°, 30°, 45°, 60°, and 90°.

The cumulative AE counts and energy dissipation increase with the specimen size, while the energy dissipation per AE count behaves in the opposite way.

This may result from the increasing amount of both preexisting discontinuities and cracks (volume/number) needed for specimen failure and the lower energy dissipation AE counts generated by them.

The effect of microstructures on the anisotropies of AE weakens with the increasing specimen size.

The TRFD and its anisotropy reduce as the specimen size increases, and the reduction of fractal dimension is most pronounced at the anisotropic angle of 45°.

The correlation between TRFD and cumulative AE energy in the specimens with different sizes are separately consistent with the negative exponential equation proposed by Xie and Pariseau.

With the specimen size gain, the reduction of the TRFD weakens with the increasing amount of cumulative absolute AE energy.