Catastrophe mechanism and disaster countermeasure for soft rock roadway surrounding rock in Meihe mine

The soft rock’s heterogeneity and nonlinear mechanical behavior cause extremely difficult maintenance on the soft rock roadway. Aiming at the asymmetric deformation and destruction phenomenon appearing after excavating and supporting the 7101 air return way in Meihe mine, this paper comprehensively adopted a variety of methods to analyze the roadway surrounding rock deformation rule, obtaining the roadway surrounding rock stress and plastic zone distribution rule under no supporting condition and the roadway surrounding rock deformation features under original symmetric supporting condition. Furthermore, this paper revealed the catastrophe mechanism, and proposed the concept of “weak structure” and the disaster countermeasure of “overall stabilizing the roadway and strengthening the support of weak structure”. The industrial test shows that the disaster control technology can realize the coordination deformation of the supporting structure and roadway surrounding rock, thus significantly controlling the deformation of roadway surrounding rock.