Abstract
Aquiclude stability is vital for the realization of water-preserving coal mining. And its evaluation, influencing factors, and their significance analysis are quite topical for the ecosystem conservation. The purpose of this paper was to establish an evaluation index system of weakly cemented aquiclude stability. An evaluation index system was built based on three evaluation factors (subsidence, seepage, and deformation), three subfactors (subsidence gradient, seepage rate, and horizontal deformation), and four evaluation criteria (unstable, weakly stable, medium stable, and stable). The evaluation method was applied to evaluate the index for the case study of Yili No. 4 Coal Mine in Xinjiang, China. Based on the geological conditions of the close-distance coal seams in the mine under study, the main influencing factors and subordinate functions of evaluation index S t a were analyzed. The above three factors’ weights were assessed as 0.1095, 0.3090, and 0.5815, respectively, and the proposed evaluation method’s feasibility was verified by the water level variation in the observation hole. The range and variance analyses were performed to assess the significance of the mining heights of the upper and lower coal seams and the coal seam spacing. The results showed that the aquiclude stability negatively correlated with the mining heights and positively correlated with the coal seam spacing. The decreasing order of influence significance on the aquiclude stability was as follows: upper coal seam mining height, lower coal seam mining height, and coal seam spacing. Water protection mining was an effective measure to control the S t a , and the findings provided a reference value and academic significance for the ecosystem conservation.
Highlights
Mining of shallow coal seams in areas with scarce water resources and environmental problems inevitably causes the overlying rock subsidence and groundwater level drop, jeopardizing the fragile ecological balance [1,2,3]
Aquiclude stability is the result of the joint effect of many factors, which may be coupled
It is not rigorous to evaluate the stability of the aquiclude from singlefactor analysis
Summary
Mining of shallow coal seams in areas with scarce water resources and environmental problems inevitably causes the overlying rock subsidence and groundwater level drop, jeopardizing the fragile ecological balance [1,2,3]. This refers to the arid and semiarid regions of western China, for which the water-preserving mining seems to be the most lucrative solution [4,5,6,7]. Water-preserving mining is concerned with the protection of water resources throughout the process of mining This is critical for rationally realizing green and climate-smart mining [8]. The quantitative evaluation of aquiclude stability has important guiding significance for water-preserving mining [9,10,11,12]
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