Mechanism of Roof Deformation and Support Optimization of Deeply Buried Roadway under Mining Conditions

Large deformations in local areas during service in a mine roadway are prone to roofing hazards, seriously threatening people’s lives and urgently needing to be addressed by means of support optimization. Traditional methods of studying the stability of the roadway roof are mainly based on the theory of the surrounding rock loosening circle, but few studies analyze the stability of roadway roofs around the failure distribution and expansion of weak interlayers. Therefore, the relationship between the deformation characteristics of the tunnel envelope and the thickness of the soft and weak interlayer and the underlying hard rock layer was investigated using a comprehensive research method such as theoretical analysis, numerical simulation, and field monitoring. The results show that the form of roadway roof failure is determined by weak interlayer thickness. For a mining-disturbed roadway, if the weak interlayer thickness remains unchanged, as the underlying hard strata thickness increases, the existence of a more integral hard stratum cannot prevent plastic zones from forming in the weak interlayer but can prevent them from developing in the key layer 1. If the underlying hard strata thickness remains unchanged, the smaller the weak interlayer thickness, the smaller the area of plastic zone failure in the roadway roof. After the deformation characteristics of the roadway containing the weak interlayer were clarified, according to its characteristics, the support optimization method of increasing the length of anchor bolt and anchor cable is proposed. The displacement of the roadway roof was reduced by 35% after verification by numerical simulation. After applying the support optimization method on site, the roadway displacement basically stabilized after 40 days, with the roof slab sinkage, two gang convergence and bottom bulge reaching 53 mm, 42 mm and 39 mm, respectively. The overall deformation of the roadway was small, effectively controlling the surrounding rock deformation and reducing economic losses for the mine.