Abstract
With the increasing depth of coal mining, the quantitative evaluation of the degree of geological structure development is becoming increasingly important for the control of mine water hazards in coal mining areas. Understanding the complexity of geological structure development can improve the safety and efficiency of coal production. At present, various evaluation indicators of the geological structure development cannot fully reflect the complexity of faults and folds, and the evaluation process is usually affected by subjective human factors. In this paper, the fractal dimension from fractal theory is used as the evaluation indicator to quantitatively analyze and evaluate the complexity of fault and fold structure in the mining area. To verify the evaluation results, the mathematical geology method is applied in an analysis of the trend surface of fault and fold networks. The results indicate that the fractal dimension can be applied for the quantitative analysis and evaluation of the complexity of fault and fold networks. In addition, the outcome of this work provides new insights into how to characterize the fault and fold structures of coal mining areas in northern China, and has some important implications to ensure the coal production safety.
Highlights
Faults and folds are the main geological structures, and their existence in the coal mining area will seriously threaten the safety of coal mining [1,2,3]
A large number of studies have proved that the fault and fold networks satisfy fractal characteristics [19,20,21], and the fractal theory has been successfully employed in the quantitative evaluation of fault and fold zone complexity
The fractal theory is applied to study the degree of geological structure development in the mining area, and the distribution and extent of faults and folds are revealed based on the self-similarity of geological structures
Summary
Faults and folds are the main geological structures, and their existence in the coal mining area will seriously threaten the safety of coal mining [1,2,3]. A large number of studies have proved that the fault and fold networks satisfy fractal characteristics [19,20,21], and the fractal theory has been successfully employed in the quantitative evaluation of fault and fold zone complexity. Shi et al used the fractal dimension as evaluation index to study the development degree of floor fault in the 3rd mining zone of the No 15 coal seam in the Liangzhuang coal mine. The fractal dimension of the fault and fold structures in this coal mining area is calculated to analyze and evaluate the complexity of the geological structures, quantitatively. The fractal theory is applied to study the degree of geological structure development in the mining area, and the distribution and extent of faults and folds are revealed based on the self-similarity of geological structures
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