Characterizing a coal from an engineering perspective for design of mining excavations is critical in order to prevent fatalities, as underground coal mines are often developed in highly stressed ground conditions. Coal pillar bursts involve the sudden expulsion of coal and rock into the mine opening. These events occur when relatively high stresses in a coal pillar, left for support in underground workings, exceed the pillar’s load capacity causing the pillar to rupture without warning. This process may be influenced by cleating, which is a type of joint system that can be found in coal rock masses. As such, it is important to consider the anisotropy of coal mechanical behavior. Additionally, if coal is expected to fail in a brittle manner, then behavior changes, such as the transition from extensional to shear failure, have to be considered and reflected in the adopted failure criteria. It must be anticipated that a different failure mechanism occurs as the confinement level increases and conditions for tensile failure are prevented or strongly diminished. The anisotropy and confinement dependency of coal behavior previously mentioned merit extensive investigation. In this study, a total of 84 samples obtained from a Utah coal mine were investigated by conducting both unconfined and triaxial compressive tests. The results showed that the confining pressure dictated not only the peak compressive strength but also the brittleness as a function of the major to the minor principal stress ratio. Additionally, an s-shaped brittle failure criterion was fitted to the results, showing the development of confinement-dependent strength. Moreover, these mechanical characteristics were found to be strongly anisotropic, which was associated with the orientation of the cleats relative to the loading direction.

No abstract

Changes of failure mechanism with increasing confinement, from extensional to shear-dominated failure, are widely observed in the rupture of intact specimens at the laboratory scale and in rock masses. In an analysis published in 2018, both unconfined and triaxial compressive tests were conducted to investigate the strength characteristics of 84 specimens of a Utah coal, including the spalling limits, the ratio of apparent unconfined compressive strength to unconfined compressive strength (UCS), the damage characteristics, and the post-yield dilatancy. These mechanical characteristics were found to be strongly anisotropic as a function of the orientation of the cleats relative to the loading direction, defined as the included angle. A total of four different included angles were used in the work performed in 2018. The authors found that the degree of anisotropic strength differed according to the included angle. However, the transition from extensional to shear failure at the given confinements was not clearly identified. In this study, a total of 20 specimens were additionally prepared from the same coal sample used in the previous study and then tested under both unconfined and triaxial compressive conditions. Because the authors already knew the most contrasting cases of the included angles from the previous work using the four included angles, they chose only two of the included angles (0° and 30°) for this study. For the triaxial compressive tests, a greater confining stress than the mean UCS was applied to the specimens in an attempt to identify the brittle-ductile transition of the coal. The new results have been compiled with the previous results in order to re-evaluate the confinement-dependency of the coal behavior. Additionally, the different confining stresses are used as analogs for different width-to-height (W/H) conditions of pillar strength. Although the W/H ratios of the specimens were not directly considered during testing, the equivalent W/H ratios of a pillar as a function of the confining stresses were estimated using an existing empirical solution. According to this relationship, the W/H at which in situ pillar behavior would be expected to transition from brittle to ductile is identified.