**Yiming Yang 1, Ting Ai 2,\*, Zetian Zhang 1, Ru Zhang 1, Li Ren 2, Jing Xie <sup>1</sup> and Zhaopeng Zhang <sup>2</sup>**


Received: 11 April 2020; Accepted: 20 June 2020; Published: 26 June 2020

**Abstract:** Research on the mining-induced mechanical behavior and microcrack evolution of deep-mined coal has become increasingly important with the sharp increase in mining depth. For rock units in front of the working face, the microcrack evolution characteristics, structural characteristics, and stress state correspond well to mining layouts and depths under deep mining. The acoustic emission (AE) characteristics of typical coal under deep mining were obtained by conducting laboratory experiments to simulate mining-induced behavior and utilizing AE techniques to capture the variation in AE temporal and spatial parameters in real time, which provide an important basis for studying the rupture mechanisms and mechanical behavior of deep-mined coal. The findings were as follows: (1) AE activity under deep mining was characterized by three stages, corresponding to crack initiation, crack stable propagation, and crack unstable propagation. As the three stages proceeded, the AE counting rate and AE energy rate presented stronger clustering characteristics, and the cumulative AE counting and cumulative AE energy exhibited a sharp increase by an order of magnitude. (2) The crack initiation and the main stages of crack propagation were determined by characteristic points of variation curves in the AE parameters over time. In the main crack propagation stage, the number of cumulative AE events and the cumulative AE counts were similar among the three mining conditions, while coal samples under coal pillar mining released the largest amount of AE energy. The amount of accumulated AE energy released by coal samples increased by one order of magnitude according to the sequence of protective coal-seam mining, top-coal caving mining, and nonpillar mining. (3) Fractal technology was applied to quantitatively analyze the AE spatial evolution process, showing that the fractal dimension of the AE location decreased as the peak stress increased, corresponding to protective seam mining, caving-coal mining, and nonpillar mining. The above results showed that the deformation and fracture characteristics of coal under deep mining followed a general law, but were affected by different mining conditions. The crack initiation and main rupture activity of coal occurred earlier under the conditions of protective seam mining, top-coal caving mining, and nonpillar mining, successively. Moreover, nonpillar mining induced the strongest and highest degree of unstable rupture of the coal body in front of the working face.

**Keywords:** acoustic emission (AE); coal; deep mining; mining layouts
