Creep Failure of Roof Stratum Above Mined-Out Area

By taking into account the rheological behavior of the rock mass, the creep failure of a roof stratum seated on pillars in mined-out area is analyzed through a newly developed visco-elastic model. The time-dependent deflection of the roof stratum is obtained by numerical inversion of Laplace transform. The study shows that when creep properties of both the pillars and roof stratum are considered, the expected deflection in the roof stratum increases with time. Consequently, the roof would fail when the critical tensile stress is reached as the result of the increased deflection. To demonstrate the present analytical procedure, the failure time of roof stratum of the Xingtai Gypsum Mine in China was estimated, and the results obtained agreed with the observation. The case study indicates that the analytic approach provides a new way to assess the potential impact of the time-dependence of the roof stratum deformation and is useful in predicting its stability above a mined-out area.