Acoustic emission characteristics in failure process of rock under different uniaxial compressive loads

Experiments on acoustic emission (AE) characteristics of full-regime rock failure are carried out with stiffness test machine (MTS) under uniaxial loading, cyclic loading-unloading conditions to obtain the relations of stress-strain, stress-time-accumulative counts of AE, stress-time-AE rates. Based on the test results, the AE characteristics of loading process, unloading and reloading of loading-unloading process are analyzed. The results show that AE phenomena can apparently appear during the process of unloading. When being reloaded under the stress level not more than 50% of the peak stress, there are less or little AE counts occurring as long as the stress level is not more than the previous loading stress level, that means the Kaiser effect occurs. While reloading is made again on the stress-level of over 60% of the peak stress, there occurs obviously AE events, that is so-called the Felicity phenomenon. Rock samples show a large amount of AE events in the post-peak region for both loading and loading-unloading processes. And the results also show that there exists a relatively tranquil period phenomenon of AE for all samples of the style of AE abruptly increasing during middle stress stage.