Search

To investigate the permeability characteristics in the in-situ fractured coal body around the perimeter of gas extraction boreholes, the steady-state permeability of fractured coal bodies with different gradations was tested using the fractured rock permeability test system. By controlling the axial displacement and permeability pressure, the permeability parameters were obtained under different porosities. The interactions between the permeability parameters and the process of permeability destabilisation are discussed. The results show that the permeability characteristics of the broken coal body obey the Forchheimer relationship: As the axial displacement increases, the permeability resistance of the fluid increases and the non-Darcy property of the sample becomes more significant. With the decrease in the porosity of the sample and the increase in the power index n, the permeability k decreases and the non-Darcy factor β increases. The final fractal structure of the sample will be changed by particle fragmentation and migration during the loading process of the sample with different levels, and the internal pore structure of the sample will further affect the penetration of the penetration channel. A critical characteristic value for the seepage instability in broken coal bodies is given, and an expression for determining the seepage instability by permeability and non-Darcy factors is proposed. The results indicate that a negative non-Darcy factor is not a necessary condition for permeability instability, and the critical Reynolds number for the permeability instability in broken coal bodies was determined from the perspective of the Reynolds number. The conclusions of this study can provide theoretical support for the theoretical study of permeability and the permeability of pre-smoking coal seams.

The permeability of crushed coal bodies plays a bottom neck role in seepage processes, which significantly limits the coal resource utilisation. To study the permeability of crushed coal bodies under pressure, the particle size distribution of crushed coal body grains is quantitatively considered by fractal theory. In addition, the parameters of the percolation characteristics of crushed coal body grains are calculated. Moreover, the permeability of the crushed coal body during recrushing is determined by the fractal dimension and porosity. A lateral limit compression test with the crushed coal bodies was carried out to illustrate the effect of the porosity on the permeability, In addition, a compressive crushed coal body size fractal–permeability model was proposed by combination of the fractal dimension and the non-Darcy equivalent permeability. The results show (1) the migration and loss of fine particles lead to a rapid increase in the porosity of the crushed coal body. (2) Increases in the effective stress cause the porosity and permeability to decrease. When the porosity decreases to approximately 0.375, its effect is undermined. (3) The migration and loss of fine particles change the pore structure and enhance the permeability properties of the skeleton, causing sudden seepage changes. (4) At low porosity, the permeability k is slightly larger than the non-Darcy equivalent permeability ke. Thus, the experimental data show an acceptable agreement with the present model. A particle size fractal–percolation model for crushed coal bodies under pressure provides a solution for effectively determining the grain permeability of the crushed coal bodies. The research results can contribute to the formation of more fractal-seepage theoretical models in fractured lithosphere, karst column pillars and coal goaf, and provide theoretical guidance for mine water disaster prevention.

The compaction and re-crushing characteristics of crushed gangue are important factors which affect the quality and effectiveness of the filling of the quarry. To study the compaction and re-crushing characteristics of the gangue particles, continuous grading and intermittent grading of two different structures were designed to study the bulk gangue particle size distribution. By conducting a side-limited uniaxial compression test on the crushed gangue, the compaction deformation parameters and particle re-crushing parameters of the samples under different axial pressure and grading conditions were calculated, the interaction between compaction and re-crushing was determined, and a compaction-re-crushing model of the crushed gangue was established. The following conclusions were obtained, (1) the axial displacement increment and fractal dimension of the graded crushed gangue are closely related to the graded structure of the skeletal particles; (2) the compaction stage of the graded crushed gangue can be divided into a fast compaction stage, a slow compaction stage, and a stable compaction stage—the fast compaction stage is significantly elastic, the slow compaction stage is more plastic, and the stable stage behavior approaches that of the original rock body; (3) the degree of crushing of the graded crushed gangue increases with an increase in axial stress, and the re-crushing of the specimen mainly occurs in the slow compaction stage; (4) the compaction-crushing-fractal evolution of the graded crushed gangue in the lateral limit compression process is established as the line of questioning. The physical significance of the parameters in the equation is discussed in this paper. The study can provide theoretical support and engineering guidance for the precise filling of a quarry and the prevention of later collapse.

Exploring the evolution characteristics of gas seepage between boreholes during the drainage process is critical for the borehole’s layout and high-efficiency gas drainage. Based on the dual-porous medium assumption and considering the effect of stress redistribution on coal seam gas seepage characteristics, a coal seam gas seepage model with a three-dimensional roadway and borehole crossing structure has been established and numerically calculated, concluding that the coal seam is between the drainage boreholes. The temporal and spatial evolution characteristics of gas pressure and permeability help elucidate the gas seepage law of the nearly flat coal seam associated with the deep soft rock roadway and borehole intersection model. The results indicate that: (1) The roadway excavation results in localized stress in some areas of the surrounding rock, reducing the strength of the coal body, increasing the expansion stress, and increasing the adsorption of gas by the coal body. (2) Along the direction of the coal seam, the permeability decreases initially and then increases. The gas pressure in the coal seam area in the middle of the borehole is higher than the pressure in the coal seam around the borehole, and the expansion stress and deformation increase, reducing the permeability of the coal body; when near the next borehole, the greater the negative pressure, the faster the desorption of the gas attracts the matrix shrinkage effect and causes the coal seam permeability rate to keep increasing. (3) The improvement of gas drainage with the overlapping arrangement of two boreholes firstly increases and then decreases as time goes on. (4) When the field test results and numerical simulation of the effective area of gas extraction are compared, the effectiveness of the model is verified. Taking the change of the porosity and the permeability into the model, it is able to calculate the radius of gas drainage more accurately.

Water content is an important factor in the deformation-destruction process of coal bodies. To analyze the influence of water on the creep acoustic emission (AE) characteristics of coal rock surrounding a borehole, we conducted graded loading creep AE tests of single-hole specimens with different water contents (0%, 4%, 8% and water-saturation) under uniaxial loading. The findings include the following: the water content affects the creep mechanical properties of the coal body around a borehole. The creep transient strain and steady-state strain increased exponentially with rising water content; the saturated specimen showed the highest increase, reaching 44.5% and 28.6%, respectively. The specimen water content affected the cumulative ringing count (CRC) and the axial strain during creep. The axial strain increased with rising water content, the CRC increased linearly with rising axial strain. The higher the water content, the greater the CRC rise. At different stress levels, the CRC in the 4%, 8% and saturated water content specimens changed by 43%, 53% and 74%, respectively. The AE ringing rate showed a pattern of grow–decline–stabilize at each creep stage. The AEs decreased significantly with the rising water content and the creep curve lagged behind the AE data. This paper provides guidelines for gas extraction, borehole maintenance and AE detection.

The effective prediction of gas concentration and the reasonable formulation of corresponding safety measures have important significance for improving the level of coal mine safety. To improve the accuracy of gas concentration prediction and enhance the applicability of the models, this paper starts with actual coal mine production monitoring data, improves the accuracy of gas concentration prediction through multi-parameter fusion prediction, and constructs a recurrent neural network (RNN)-based multi-parameter fusion prediction of coal face gas concentration. We determined the performance evaluation index of the model’s prediction method; used the grid search method to optimize the hyperparameters of the batch size; and used the number of neurons, the learning rate, the discard ratio, the network depth, and the early stopping method to prevent overfitting. The gas concentration prediction models—based on RNN and PSO-SVR and PSO-Adam-BP neural networks—were compared and analyzed experimentally with the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) as the performance evaluation index. The result show that using the grid search method to adjust the batch size, the number of neurons, the learning rate, the discard ratio, and the network depth can effectively find the optimal hyperparameter combination. The training error can be reduced to 0.0195. Therefore, Adam’s optimized RNN gas concentration prediction model had higher accuracy and stability than the BP neural network and SVR. During training, the mean absolute error (MAE) could be reduced to 0.0573, and the root mean squared error (RMSE) could be reduced to 0.0167; however, the MAPE could be reduced to 0.3384% during prediction. The RNN gas concentration prediction model and parameter optimization method based on Adam optimization can effectively predict gas concentration. This method shows high accuracy in the prediction of gas concentration time series and can be used as a reference model for predicting mine gas concentration.

Effective prediction of gas concentrations and reasonable development of corresponding safety measures have important guiding significance for improving coal mine safety management. In order to improve the accuracy of gas concentration prediction and enhance the applicability of the model, this paper proposes a long short-term memory (LSTM) cyclic neural network prediction method based on actual coal mine production monitoring data to select gas concentration time series with larger samples and longer time spans, including model structural design, model training, model prediction, and model optimization to implement the prediction algorithm. By using the minimum objective function as the optimization goal, the Adam optimization algorithm is used to continuously update the weight of the neural network, and the network layer and batch size are tuned to select the optimal one. The number of layers and batch size are used as parameters of the coal mine gas concentration prediction model. Finally, the optimized LSTM prediction model is called to predict the gas concentration in the next time period. The experiment proves the following: The LSTM gas concentration prediction model uses large data volume sample prediction, more accurate than the bidirectional recurrent neural network (BidirectionRNN) model and the gated recurrent unit (GRU) model. The average mean square error of the prediction model can be reduced to 0.003 and the predicted mean square error can be reduced to 0.015, which has higher reliability in gas concentration time series prediction. The prediction error range is 0.0005–0.04, which has better robustness in gas concentration time series prediction. When predicting the trend of gas concentration time series, the gas concentration at the time inflection point can be better predicted and the mean square error at the inflection point can be reduced to 0.014, which has higher applicability in gas concentration time series prediction.

For studying the law of crack propagation around a gas drilling borehole, an experimental study about coal with a cavity under uniaxial compression was carried out, with the digital speckle correlation method capturing the images of coal failure. A sequence of coal failure images and the full-field strain of failure were obtained. The strain softening characteristic was shown by the curve. A method of curve dividing—named fitting-damaging—was proposed, combining the least square fitting residual norm and damage fraction. By this method, the five stages and four key points of a stress-strain curve were defined. Then, the full-field stress was inverted by means of the theory of elasticity and the adjacent element weight sharing model. The results show that σci was 30.28–41.71 percent of σf and σcd was 83.08–87.34 percent of σf, calculated by the fitting-damaging method, agreeing with former research. The results of stress inversion showed that under a low stress level (0.15 σf < σ < 0.5 σf), microdamage evolving into plastic failure later was formed around the cavity. Under a high stress level (0.5 σf < σ < 0.85 σf), the region of stress concentration suddenly crazed and formed a brittle crack. When σ ≥ 0.85 σf, the crack was developing, crack lines were connecting with each other, and the coal finally failed. The outcome of the stress inversion was completely concomitant with the images of crack propagation. Additionally, the stress around the cavity was able to be calculated accurately.