Experimental and numerical investigation on effects of gas adsorption pressures on damage behaviors, failure characteristics, and energy evolution of coals

Coal and gas outbursts are anthropogenic hazards that can be divided into four stages: preparation, occurrence, development, and termination. Studying the influence of gas on coal damage and energy changes during the formation of outbursts is highly important for investigating the entire hazard. In this paper, laboratory experiments were performed on samples. The energy changes and failure mechanism of coal under different gas pressures were revealed, and a seepage model was established based on compressibility and adsorption to investigate gas-induced coal damage. The results demonstrated that gas pressure caused initial damage within the coal, resulting in nonlinear deformation and strength deterioration of the coal. Gas-induced damage affected the energy evolution mechanism of coal under loading, as pressure caused the premature release of energy at the tips of internal microcracks and reduced the ability to accumulate energy. These changes increased the proportion of dissipative energy under unstable conditions. The combined acoustic emission (AE) parameters-rising angle (RA) and average frequency (AF)-were used to study the fracture mode of gas-containing coal. As the gas pressure increased from 0 to 4 MPa, the RA-AF distribution pattern changed from tensile failure to tensile-shear composite failure, with the proportion of shear cracks increasing from 0.30% to 25.44%. As the complexity of the crack network increased, the randomness of crack propagation increased, and the fracture surface roughness parameters, arithmetic mean height S-a, root mean square height S-q, and maximum height S-z increased by 90.33%, 94.02%, and 81.70%, respectively. These findings could contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the underlying mechanism of coal and gas outbursts and guide for predicting and preventing these hazards.