Ultimate Bearing Capacity of Weak Foundations under Coal Pillars

Abstract

In many underground coal mines, a seam is underlain by weak floor material, and the load-carrying capacity of a pillar may be limited not by its own strength but by the bearing capacity of the floor. It has been proposed that bearing capacity may be estimated by formulae such as those of Terzaghi for structural footings on soil, but that approach is generally not valid because, for the slip surfaces assumed in the derivations of the formulae, the rock rises out of the floor beneath adjacent pillars. In the limiting equilibrium analysis proposed here, the distance to the side of a pillar to which a slip surface extends can be constrained according to the roadway or bord width. Examples are shown of the computation of bearing capacities of both homogeneous and multilayer dry and fully saturated floors, and results compared with those of elastoplastic finite element analysis. An approximate comparison with bearing capacities according to Terzaghi's formula for a strip footing is also presented for the hypothetical cases of wider roadways for which the assumed slip surfaces do not extend under adjacent pillars. For the cases considered, there is satisfactory agreement with Terzaghi’s analysis and good agreement with the results of finite element analysis. However, only one finite element analysis was carried out, and it remains to be seen whether such agreement is consistently achieved for ranges of floor strength parameters and horizontal stress.