Abstract: Rock was a kind of typical inhomogeneous brittle material abundant in various deficiencies such as microcracks,gaps and joints and would generate a large quantity of acoustic emission signals during damage process under loading.Application of locating techniques with acoustic emission to monitoring rock damage was a good method to study 3D spatial evolutional pattern of microcrack initiation,propagation,expansion and breakthrough during rock failure process.The Geiger locating algorithm was used to verify the locating precision of acoustic emission generated during rock failure.It was shown that the locating precision of acoustic emission would be much better if the Geiger locating algorithm was applied.The rock acoustic emission system was accurate and could monitor the real-time microcrack propagation.The process of the acoustic emission and rock damage were consistent and the locating results could reflect the process of initial,propagation and breakthrough of microcracks accurately.The locating results of the intact specimens and the samples with pre-cracks were in acordance with the real failure pattern of rock,indicating that it was a good tool to study the rock failure mechanism.