Abstract
Coal usually contains many cracks which affect the stability of mining zone. In order to research the fracture mechanism of cracked coal, a special case of three collinear cracks filling with gas is considered. A set of complex stress functions which satisfy all the required conditions are first derived, based on Muskelishvili’s results. The least square boundary collocation method is used to enforce the external boundaries approximately, and the stress intensity factors (SIF) can then be computed according to the related formulae. The value of SIFs for different crack orientations, different crack distance under different loading are calculated. The results shows that the most unfavorable crack orientation is in the 45° angle and the confining stress and the distance between cracks have a considerable effect on the SIF value.
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