Abstract: With the increase of mining depth and strength of coal seam，the compressive deformation and failure characteristics of the roof and floor strata of coal seam and coal pillar become an important factor in determining the safety of underground construction personnel. In order to study the failure characteristics of specific coal strata under compression，this paper takes the Daqing limestone roof at 1195 working face of Gequan Mine as the research object and adopts the comprehensive research methods of laboratory test，numerical simulation and acoustic emission to study the failure process and acoustic emission characteristics of Daqing limestone under uniaxial compression. The experimental results show that the rock failure process can be divided into elastic stage，yield stage and post-peak stage，and the residual strength of rock is 40% of the peak strength. The numerical simulation results show that the model presents an inverted V-shaped fracture starting from the top，and the calculated results of RFPA2D software are basically consistent with the experimental results. The acoustic emission characteristic results show that when the model fails，the number and energy of acoustic emission increase dramatically，and it mainly appears at the failure unit. In other words，acoustic emission can effectively predict the fracture location and process of the rock.

Key words: Daqing limestone, uniaxial compression, numerical simulation, RFPA2D software, acoustic emission