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Abstract The high‐pressure gas expansion‐induced deformation and dynamic fracture of coal are important parts of coal and gas outburst. To better understand the law of this process, laboratory experiments and numerical simulation are used to study the law of damage. A cavity with different pressures of CH4 or N2 was destroyed by a jack to achieve the rapid expansion of the gas and coal fracture inside. The particle size distribution of the coal particles before and after the experiment was measured, and the breakage ratio and the newly added surface area were calculated. The experimental results indicate that during the gas expansion process, the breakage ratio of coal and the newly added surface area clearly increase with the increase in gas pressure. Finally, a numerical model based on peridynamic theory was developed to simulate crack generation and the propagation of coal induced by the expansion of gases at different pressures. The numerical simulation results show that the higher the initial gas pressure is, the higher the number of failure units. Moreover, only when the gas pressure is large enough will the coal crack in various directions at the same time.

An experiment designed to simulate coal during excavation was conducted. Microseismic signals of coal under vibration conditions during excavation and subsequent waiting time of the coal roadway at different excavation speeds were collected and analyzed. During the excavation and subsequent waiting time, the stress in coal is redistributed, and the concentrated stress is gradually transferred to the deeper section of the coal seam. The Hilbert–Huang transform (HHT) is used to effectively denoise the collected signals. According to the noise-reduced signal, the amplitude and pulse number of the microseismic signals emitted during the excavation process are much larger than those of the waiting time process. During excavation, the energy and event numbers of microseismic signals increase first and then decrease as the excavation speed increases. The faster the excavation speed, the more the energy, and the higher the event numbers of the microseismic signals released during the subsequent waiting time. When the excavation speed is faster, more elastic potential accumulates in the coal seam and the concentration stress is greater. As the concentrated stress moves forward in time without excavation, more coal seams fail, and more microseismic signals are released. The microseismic signal and the stress evolution law can provide a reasonable explanation for the forward movement of the concentrated stress and coal failure during roadway excavation.

To investigate the fracture characterizations of rocks under high strain rate tensile failure, a series of dynamic Brazilian tests was conducted using Split Hopkinson pressure bar (SHPB), and a high-speed digital camera at a frame rate of 50,000 frames per second (FPS) with a resolution of 272 × 512 pixels was adopted to capture the real-time images and visualize the failure processes. Using the extracted cracks and image processing technique, the relationship between loading condition (impact velocity), crack propagation process (crack velocity, crack fractal characteristic, and crack morphological features), and dynamic mechanical properties (absorbed energy and strain-stress parameters) was explored and analyzed. The experimental results indicate that (1) impact velocity plays a critical role in both crack propagation process and dynamic mechanical properties, (2) the crack fractal dimension is positively correlated with crack propagation velocity and has a linear relationship with the proposed morphological feature of crack, (3) mean strain rate and max strain of rocks under SHPB loading both decrease with the increase of crack propagation velocity, and (4) the energy absorbed by the rocks increases with increasing impact velocity and has a strong negative correlation with a proposed novel crack descriptor. Experimental studies pertaining to the measurement of crack propagation path and velocity, in particular, some crack feature extraction approaches, present a promising way to reveal the fracture process and failure mechanisms of rock-like materials.