A Numerical Modeling Approach for Assessment of Seepage Characteristics and Performance of Protective Water Barrier Pillars in Underground Coal Mines

Characteristics of waterproof failure and optimal width of narrow coal pillars under the coupled effects of mining, excavation and seepage

“…To prevent water inrush disasters, it is common practice in mine development to leave a certain width of coal pillars between adjacent working faces, as shown in Fig. 2, to block the accumulation of water in the gob (Wang et al 2021;Chen et al 2022a;Galav et al 2022;He and Huang 2022;Fang et al 2023). The stability of these waterproof coal pillars has long been one of the critical research topics in coal mine development (Wang 2006;Hu et al 2019;Li et al 2021;He et al 2023).…”

Water-bearing effect on mechanical properties and interface failure mode of coal–rock combination samples

“…However, with gradual exhaustion of easily mined coal resources, coal mining under complex conditions became more and more topical. In the process of underground coal mining, the specific geological environment such as water-rich aquifers (Fan and Zhang, 2015), artificial dams of underground reservoir (Lyu et al, 2022) and water-resisting coal pillars (Galav et al, 2022) will act on the coal-rock mass as a water-bearing environment, harming its mechanical properties, structural integrity, bearing capacity, and stability. Eventually, this action will have a fatal impact on the large coal-rock structures, violate the overall coal-rock system stability, and pose a potential threat to coal mine production safety (Ding et al, 2021;Frenelus et al, 2022;Liu et al, 2020;Ma et al, 2018;Wang et al, 2021a;Yi et al, 2022).…”