Waveform signatures of acoustic emission from thermally and mechanically induced microfracture in centrally apertured basalt

Acoustic emission (AE) monitoring is widely applied to track damage development in brittle rock, although relating recorded signals to specific fracture mechanisms can remain uncertain, particularly when comparing thermal and mechanical loadings. This contribution presents a preliminary assessment of AE waveform characteristics measured during two heating-only experiments and two uniaxial compressive strength (UCS) experiments performed on 100 mm diameter basalt specimens containing a central axial circular hole. This geometry provides a consistent configuration that promotes stress redistribution and damage localisation around an opening, allowing fracture processes to be compared within a common specimen form.

Full AE waveforms were acquired throughout each test using broadband piezoelectric sensors coupled to the specimen surface, with pre-amplification and digital acquisition. Event features were extracted in the time and frequency domains, including rise angle, duration, hit counts, average frequency, peak frequency, peak amplitude, and amplitude distributions. Feature-space comparisons were then used to evaluate whether thermally and mechanically induced microfracturing exhibit separable signal characteristics.

The thermal experiments were associated with a single dominant fracture initiating along the shortest ligament between the aperture boundary and the nearest specimen edge. In contrast, UCS loading produced a more complex fracture network consistent with mixed tensile and shear microfracturing. Rise angle versus hits per duration plots indicated that thermal events occupied a more restricted region, whereas UCS events displayed a broader spread, which may reflect greater variability in source processes during complex damage evolution. Frequency-based comparisons further highlighted the differences: thermally induced events clustered mainly within a lower-frequency band (approximately 100-300 kHz), while the UCS tests exhibited an additional higher-frequency population (approximately 400-600 kHz), alongside the lower-frequency component. Amplitude distributions were also differed, with thermal events tending toward a narrower amplitude range relative to the wider distribution observed under UCS loading. Collectively, these observations suggest that the combined time-domain, frequency-domain, and amplitude-based AE features support mechanism-informed discrimination between thermally driven tensile fracture and mechanically driven complex fracture networks providing a basis for subsequent statistical or learning-based classification in coupled thermomechanical experiments