The coda wave propagation path has received extensive attention as it is more sensitive to small changes in the medium than the direct wave. During the process of loading, the wave velocity, medium or source changes may cause the coda wave to change. The physical mechanism of change in the ultrasonic coda wave varies during different deformation stages. Meanwhile, there exist local damages in the rock sample during the deformation, and it will be accompanied by acoustic emission. Combining the ultrasonic coda wave and acoustic emission is beneficial to characterize the coda wave characteristics and damage degree of the sample at different deformation stages. In this paper, three kinds of rocks, including granodiorite, marble and sandstone with the sizes of 50mm×50mm×150mm, are used to carry out observations of ultrasonic coda wave and acoustic emission during the whole process of loading so as to study characteristics of the coda wave at different deformation stages. The major results are given below: 1)There is a good correspondence between the coda wave variation and the acoustic emission evolution process. When the acoustic emission frequency increases, the coda wave changes accordingly. In particular, the coda wave changes in the early stages of increased acoustic emission frequency, which indicates that the early damage information of rock can be obtained by analysis of the coda wave. 2)The physical mechanism of the coda wave change is different in different deformation stages. At the initial stage of loading, there are obvious scatterer changes in the coda wave change; then, in the linear elastic deformation stage, the wave velocity change is dominating; in the late-stage of loading, the scatterer change increases and coexists with the wave velocity change, the scatterer change effect is related with the rock micro-fracture degree, the rock will locally be damaged before rupturing, and the role of the scatterer will be enhanced. 3)With the increase of loading, the amplitude of increase of the wave velocity generally decreases gradually, which is basically consistent with the understanding obtained through the direct wave. The interference of acoustic emission can be eliminated because of the Kaiser effect when analyzing the coda wave. The consistency of the wave velocity change and stress loading and unloading is further verified. 4)The micro-fracture generated during rock deformation will change the physical mechanism of the coda wave change, and the scatterer effect will be significantly enhanced. At the same time, the acoustic emission waveform will cause interference to the ultrasonic coda wave. This means that attention needs to be paid when analyzing rock damage using only coda wave data. In short, the ultrasonic coda wave and acoustic emission can reflect the damage inside the rock, and the change mechanism of the coda wave in different deformation stages is different. The joint observation of the two can play a mutual verification role, which is conducive to improving the reliability of the observation results.

In the simulation experiments of earthquakes in laboratory, the instability slip or rupture events are obtained through steady state loading to simulate earthquake processes. In the experiments, steady-state deformation and unstable sliding occur alternately. It is hard to determine the origin time and duration of the instability event of fault, and there may be many instability events in one experiment. Therefore, in order to ensure that sufficient data is obtained at the extremely short instability moment to analyze the mechanical process of the earthquake source, the data acquisition system is required to continuously collect data at high-speed from the beginning of the experiment until the end, and the lasting time can be more than ten hours, so it requires huge storage space. Although the upper frequency limit of the instability signal is unknown exactly, but the previous experiments have shown that the frequency of the signal will reach hundred to several kilohertz, so the sampling frequency of the data acquisition should be above megahertz. In this case of long-time continuous high-frequency data acquisition, it is still necessary to maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio. Furthermore, previous studies have proved that the source mechanics field has a complex spatial structure, which is difficult to describe with a few measuring points, and it is necessary to perform simultaneous measurements of the source mechanics field for dozens or more measuring points. The combination of long-term continuous recording, high-resolution high-frequency sampling and multi-point simultaneous measurement poses a huge challenge to the technical indicators of the observing system. With the method for composing distributed synchronous acquisition machine group by using multiple high-resolution high-frequency sampling computers, a super dynamic deformation measurement system of high signal-to-noise ratio, which features 64-channel, 16-bit resolution, 4MHz sampling frequency, and parallel continuous acquisition with tens of hours was developed. This system can realize the synchronous acquisition of various signals, such as strain, acoustic emission, electromagnetic waves and displacement, so it is convenient for analyzing the conversion relationship between various physical quantities.