NEW BOUNDARY ELEMENT METHOD FOR ANALYSIS OF SURFACE SUBSIDENCE DUE TO COAL MINING

Rock and coal in coal bearing formation belong to layered sedimentary rocks. Their large-scale subsidence may occur because of coal mining. Thus, it is one of research highlights to develop an analytical tool suitable for these layered rocks. This paper presents a new Boundary Element Method (BEM) for analysis of the surface subsidence due to coal mining. The BEM uses the fundamental solution of layered materials,4～8 noded elements to discretize the boundaries, and effective numerical methods to calculate the singular integrals. An example with exact solutions is used to verify the numerical method. Finally, the numerical method is used to analyze in situ surface subsidence due to coal mining. The result shows that the proposed BEM can analyze the surface subsidence due to coal mining with high efficiency and good accuracy.