Design and application of solid, dense backfill advanced mining technology with two pre-driving entries

New solid backfill mining technology provides unique technical advantages for “three-under” coal mining which refers to coal resources trapped under buildings, railways, and water bodies. This technology has a much higher recovery rate and can effectively control the surface subsidence. However, successful application of this technology depends heavily on geological conditions. To avoid the disadvantages associated with downward mining and overhead backfilling with this new technology, a new advanced solid backfill mining design with two pre-driving entries is proposed here to ensure the backfill effect. Taking Huayuan coal mine as an example, this paper tests the double gob-side entries retaining with no pillar left scheme and optimizes an integrated technology setup for backfill mining and gob-side entry retaining. Field applications show that the recovery rate increased from 40% for strip mining to 85% for backfill mining. Moreover, the new backfill technology allowed for better control over the surrounding rock deformation caused by the gob-side entry retaining effect and better control of ground subsidence as compared to strip mining.