Abstract
Shirengou iron mine in Hebei Province, China is now under transition from open pit to underground mining. During this process, the unstable failure risk of crown pillar is growing as a result of underground mining, fault activation and water seepage. To monitor the stability of the crown pillar, a microseismic monitoring system was equipped in 2006. Based on temporal and spatial distribution of microseismic events and deformation mechanism, it was found that it is the propagation of the buried fault F15 that causes the failure of the crown pillar, resulting in increased water seeping into the underground drifts. By analyzing the temporal changes in multiple microseismic parameters during the fracture process of the crown pillar, it was found that several distinct abnormalities in the microseismic data such as a rapid decrease in the b value, a sharp increase in energy release, an abnormal increase in apparent stress and a low dominant frequency, could be judged as the signal of an increasing risk. Therefore, the microseismic monitoring has been proven to be a suitable method for understanding damage and fracture process of the crown pillar during the transition from open pit to underground mining.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Basic Research Program (973) of China (No. 2013CB227902), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (N130501002, N120601002) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51174045, 51034001, 41172265, 51404067).
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Zhang, P., Yang, T., Yu, Q. et al. Microseismicity Induced by Fault Activation During the Fracture Process of a Crown Pillar. Rock Mech Rock Eng 48, 1673–1682 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00603-014-0659-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00603-014-0659-9