“…Generally, these composite structures were simplified to the rock-coal, coal-rock, and rock-coal-rock composite samples with a bonded or frictional interface to study their mechanical behaviors in previous experimental and numerical simulation investigations . These studies focused on the effects of the height ratio of coal to rock [12,22,[31][32][33], the interface between rock and coal [11][12][13][14]19], the composite model [36], the loading conditions (uniaxial loading, triaxial loading, cyclic loading and unloading, and true triaxial loading) [14,21,24,25,27,34,35], the defects within the coal or rock, and the mechanical properties (strength, stiffness, lithology, etc.) of rock or coal [19,20,26] on the strength, deformation, energy evolution, electromagnetic radiation characteristics [28,29], acoustic emission (AE) characteristics, and failure properties of composite samples.…”