Quantitative Analysis of Acoustic Emission From Rock Fracture Experiments

This thesis aims to advance the methods of quantitative acoustic emission (AE) analysis by calibrating sensors, characterizing sources, and applying the results to solve engi- neering problems. In the first part of this thesis, we built a calibration apparatus and successfully calibrated two commercial AE sensors. The ErgoTech sensor was found to have broadband velocity sensitivity and the Panametrics V103 was sensitive to surface normal displacement. These calibration results were applied to two AE data sets from rock fracture experiments in order to characterize the sources of AE events. The first data set was from an in situ rock fracture experiment conducted at the Underground Research Laboratory (URL). The Mine-By experiment was a large scale excavation re- sponse test where both AE (10 kHz - 1 MHz) and microseismicity (MS) (1 Hz - 10 kHz) were monitored. Using the calibration information, magnitude, stress drop, dimension and energy were successfully estimated for 21 AE events recorded in the tensile region of the tunnel wall. Magnitudes were in the range -7.5Ph.D