Abstract
Underground coal seam mining has been carried out in the Upper Silesian Coal Basin, Poland, for many years and with a simultaneous increase in exploitation depth. Frequently, coal seams are not fully extracted due to numerous reasons which lead to their edges and remnants remaining in the rock mass. Even in the case of the full extraction of a coal seam, mining usually ends at the border of a protecting pillar to protect underground or surface objects, sometimes at the border of the mining area, or some distance from the old goaf or high throw fault. Extraction of subsequent coal seams in an analogous range results in a cluster of coal seam edges remaining. In the vicinity of the mentioned remainders, the disrupted stress distribution is expected. The infraction of the aforementioned equilibrium repeatedly results in the occurrence of strong mining tremors. The observations from the studied coal seam no. 408’s longwall panel indicated that mining works are able to disturb the present stress-strain equilibrium in the area of the edges of other coal seams, even if they are located at a greater vertical distance away. The seismological parameters and distributions have been applied for this purpose.
Highlights
Longwall mining is the most popular method of underground hard coal mining in Poland and in the world
Highlights We reviewed a catalogue of mining tremors that occurred during longwall mining of coal seam no. 408 in one of the hard coal mines in the Upper Silesian Coal Basin, Poland
The results suggested that heterogeneous geological and mining conditions in hard coal mines are reflected in the pseudoacceleration-like type of the Benioff strain release (BSR), and the location of the events is in accordance with the longwall face advance; the events were located mainly in the seam and its surroundings
Summary
Longwall mining is the most popular method of underground hard coal mining in Poland and in the world. Especially longwall mining, can trigger a slip of the pre-existing fault plane (Stec 2007; Wojtecki et al 2016) Hypocentres of these types of mining tremors are located in the vicinity of naturally occurring faults. Mining tremors correlated with the stress release in the vicinity of the coal seams edges are usually strong. An attempt to investigate how the current mine works can influence the stress release through seismicity in the area of remnants in shallower coal seams was made For this purpose, the distributions of energy and frequency of mining tremors and the Benioff plot were applied. Some relationships between these quantities and edges of far-distant coal seams were observed
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