Abstract: The CT scanning technology based on the X-Ray, which can scan a rock specimen through multilayer continuously and nondestructively, has been introduced into the study of the rock mechanics and engineering widely. It is one of the important content of rock mechanics research, to monitor the failure processing of rock sample under uniaxial compression loading by CT technology. During the 3D microscope CT real-time monitoring of rock condition under uniaxial compression loading, there will be some error caused by the imprecise positioning of the CT scanner device. Aiming at this imperfection, a new CT slice image processing method based on image retrieval (IR) technology, is proposed. Coal and rock sample under uniaxial compression loading, is monitored during its failure process, and with the similarity computing method based on the Manhattan distance measure introduced, the rock sample’s CT image and its similar-slices of different stress stages are retrieved. The results show that: The IR technology may effectively reduce the error due to the displacement during the coal and rock failure process; with the help of CT slice image, microcrack distribution and evolution rule of the coal and rock samples in different stress stages, can be preferably described; moreover, at mesoscopic level, the basic law of coal and rock failure process under the uniaxial compression loading, get further revealed.

Key words: rock mechanics, uniaxial compression, image retrieval technology, mini-sample, microscope CT, mesoscopic level