The deformations and failures of coal wall in front of a working face cause serious mining difficulties. This paper presents the results of the physical model experiments that were conducted to study the deformation and failure process of coal seam in front of a longwall working face. In order to simulate the formation process of the bearing pressure on the roof rock seam, the special loading device was designed. The stepped loadings were applied on the top side of a sample to simulate the non-uniform loading on the coal seam. The proposed integrity coefficient was used to evaluate the failures of the coal seam. Results show that in the advancing process of a working face, the coal seam undergoes a complex fracturing process and the fracturing of coal seam is closely related to the distance from the coal wall. When the coal body is quite close to the wall of a working face, different types of fracture surfaces appear. The fracture surfaces near the front face of coal wall are tensile while the fracture surfaces away from the front face of coal wall are shear and tensile or shear. These results are useful for understanding the deformation and failure of coal wall.

工作面前煤壁的变形和破坏导致严重的开采困难。本文介绍了为研究长壁工作面前煤层的变形和破坏过程而进行的物理模型实验的结果。为了模拟顶岩缝上承压的形成过程，设计了专用的加载装置。将阶梯式载荷施加到样品的顶部，以模拟煤层上的非均匀载荷。提出的完整性系数用于评估煤层的破坏。结果表明，在工作面推进过程中，煤层经历了复杂的压裂过程，煤层的破裂与距煤壁的距离密切相关。当煤体非常靠近工作面壁时，会出现不同类型的断裂面。靠近煤壁正面的断裂面是张性的，而远离煤壁正面的断裂面是剪力和张性或剪力。这些结果对于理解煤壁的变形和破坏是有用的。