Analysis of Water Insulating Effect of Compound Water-Resisting Key Strata in Deep Mining

The problem of water preservation in mining and the prevention of water-bursts has been one of the more important issues in deep mining. Based on the concept of water-resisting key strata, the mechanics model of the key strata is established given the structural characteristics and the mechanical properties of the roof rock layers of the working face in a particular coal mine. Four other models were derived from this model by re-arranging the order of the layers in the key strata. The distribution characteristics of stress, deformation, pore pressure and the flow vector of all the models are computed using the analytical module of fluid-structure interaction in the FLAC software and the corre-sponding risks of a water-burst are analyzed. The results indicate that the water-insulating ability of the key strata is re-lated to the arrangement of soft and hard rocks. The water-insulating ability of the compound water-resisting key strata (CWKS) with a hard-hard-soft-hard-soft compounding order is the best under the five given simulated conditions. © 2007 The Journal of China University of Mining & Technology.