Spatiotemporal multifractal characteristics of electromagnetic radiation in response to deep coal rock bursts

Abstract. Dynamic collapses of deeply mined coal rocks are severe threats to miners, in order to predict the collapses more accurately using electromagnetic radiation (EMR), we investigate the spatiotemporal multifractal characteristics and formation mechanism of EMR induced by underground coal mining. Coal rock in the burst-prone zone often exchanges materials and energy with its environment and gradually transits from its original stable equilibrium structure to a non-equilibrium dissipative structure with implicit spatiotemporal complexity or multifractal structures, resulting in temporal variation in multifractal EMR. The inherent law of EMR time series during damage evolution was analyzed by using time-varying multifractal theory. Results show that the time-varying multifractal characteristics of EMR are determined by damage evolutions process, the dissipated energy caused by damage evolutions such as crack propagation, fractal sliding and shearing can be regarded as the fingerprint of various EMR micro-mechanics. Dynamic spatiotemporal multifractal spectrum of EMR considers both spatial (multiple fractures) and temporal (dynamic evolution) characteristics of coal rocks, and records the dynamic evolution processes of rock bursts. Thus, it can be used to evaluate the coal deformation and fracture process. The study is of significance for us to in-depth understand EMR mechanism and to increase the accuracy of applying the EMR method to forecast dynamic disasters.