Geotech Geol Eng
outburst has caused great losses to people’s lives and
properties in the past few decades, it’s a severe issue
on coal resource exploitation and needs to be handle
urgently (He et al. 2009; Fisne and Esen 2014;
Hudecek 2008). Moreover, methane is non-renewable
clean energy, therefore it’s critical to facilitate gas
extraction ratio and and promote gas utilization ratio
to improve production status of coal mine and reduce
gas outburst disasters (Wu et al. 2004; Xie et al. 2014).
Up till now, the commonly used technologies to
improve gas permeability include pre-splitting blast-
ing, hydraulic flushing and hydraulic cutting seam, etc.
Domestic and foreign researchers had contributed a
lot to study HF technology and illustrated that it’s a
valid method for gas permeability improvement in
coal mines. Hitherto, the main methods to determine
influence scope are to analyze the water content of
coal, the gas extraction area after HF (Wang 2019),
tracer gas may also be used sometimes. While there
are few literatures focus on the application of transient
electromagnetic method (TEM) in HF realm, thus we
concentrate on the appliance of TEM in HF field
experiment in our study. In this paper, HF field
experiment was conducted in a coal mine located in
Yibin City, Sichuan Province. The transient electro-
magnetic instrument was put in use before and after
HF respectively, the coal-rock mass main cracking
area and influence scope of HF was finally determined
combined with numerical simulation analysis. The
objective of this research is to provide a new approach
to gauge the influence scope of HF and figure out
whether it’s viable to measure HF influence area
through TEM.
(
Wang et al. 2014; Nesterova 2017; Shen et al.2018).
Then hydraulic fracturing (HF) technology was intro-
duced into coal mine field (Morgenstern and Sepehr
1
991). In HF, the fracturing fluid (usually water) is
continuously injected into coal seam through high-
pressure pump. The coal seam would be crushed and
develope lots of new fissures when the pressure of
fracturing fluid exceeds coal seam strength. These
fissures provide more channels for gas flow, thus the
permeability of coal seam increases.
Some scholars have studied the application of HF
technique on natural gases, petroleum and shale gas
industry and found that it’s effective for improving
production (Wanniarachchi et al. 2019; Vishkai and
Gates 2019; Nasriani and Jamiolahmady 2019).
Moradi et al. (2017) investigated HF propagation
process and its associated parameters in different
conditions. Kang et al. (2018) performed field exper-
iment in coal mine and obtained that HF in the main
roof can substantially reduce abutment stresses. Szott
et al. (2018) through numerical studies found that
hydrofracturing can significantly enhance methane
drainage of coal seams under appropriate parameters.
Ni et al. (2018) carried out pulsating HF industrial
experiments to improve the coal seam gas permeabil-
ity and studied some physical properties, they con-
cluded that the coal seam permeability coefficient
increased by 48–217 times after the experiments. Li
et al. (2019) proposed a new method of HF for low
permeability coal seals in China, it can increase the
effective water pressure so that can get better effects.
Zhang et al. (2018) performed HF field experiment in a
coal mine located in Sichuan, China, they acquired
that the methane extraction rate of single fracturing
borehole was approximately ten times larger com-
pared to average extraction borehole.
2 Theories Introduction
2.1 Water Motion Characteristics in Coal Seam
Hydraulic fracturing cracks the stratum by injecting
high-pressure liquid (such as water), then continu-
ously injecting water to extend the fractures further.
The water injection process is actually an unsaturated
permeation process.The general process is that the
liquid firstly flows into preexisting fissures or weak
planes, then facilitates to form secondary induced
weak planes, and finally into micro fissures (Guo et al.
1993). The dominant water movement type in HF
process is the permeation in fissures, diffusion in
micropores and the capillary movement in pores.,
According to the mass conservation and permeability
theory in high-pressure water injection process, it can
be known:
8
divV ¼ ÀoDS=ot
>
>
>
<
divV ¼ k1ðP1 À P2Þ
V ¼ Àk2gradP1
P1 ¼ wðP1; DSÞ
ð1Þ
>
>
>
:
Where V is the permeation velocity of water in
fissures; P and P is the water pressure outside and
1
2
1
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