Abstract: China is vast in territory and complex geological condition.Because we don't know geological pictures in front of the roadway,so there are too many accidents such as coal and gas out burst,water inrush,landslides,and other geological disasters.This is particularly true in the coal mine tunnel during the tunneling process.In order to solve these problems,this paper presents a Rayleigh wave exploration method to be used in coal mine for detecting in advance and briefly introduce the basic principles of Rayleigh wave exploration.Using the character istic that the Rayleigh wave has a dispersion feature for the layered media,we detected those complex geological structures,such as faults,fracture zone,rock irrigation,and collapse columns,which are in front direction of the driving face.to the result of in-site-collected data process and analysis is similar to the that of actual drilling,showing the Rayleigh wave detection tech-nology can be effectively used for detection in advance and can solvea number of geological problems.Being used in combination with drilling,this method further improved the geological prediction.