Technical Papers

Room-and-pillar panel design

method to avoid surface subsidence
by Y. Luo
Abstract In designing and operating underground room-and-pillar coal mines, it is always
difficult to achieve a good balance between preventing surface subsidence and achieving
high recovery ratio. In this paper, a design methodology applying the pressure arch theory
is proposed, and the principles and mathematical models involved are detailed. A computer
program was developed to carry out the design optimization process and was applied to the
examination of a documented case in which a massive cascading pillar failure had occurred
over a large area in a shallow coal mine. The results indicate that the proposed design method
can be applied to prevent subsidence while achieving reasonably high recovery ratio for roomand-pillar mining operations.
Mining Engineering, 2015, Vol. 67, No. 7, pp. 105-110.
Official publication of the Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration Inc.

Resumen Cuando se disea y operan minas de carbn subterrneas con el mtodo

de cmaras y pilares, es siempre difcil obtener un buen equilibrio entre la prevencin de
subsidencia de la superficie y la obtencin de un alto coeficiente de recuperacin. En este
trabajo se propone una metodologa de diseo aplicando la teora de arco de presin y se
detallan los principios y modelos matemticos involucrados. Se desarroll un programa
de computadora a fin de realizar el proceso de optimizacin del diseo y fue aplicado a
la examinacin de un caso documentado en el que haba sucedido una falla masiva de
un pilar en cascada sobre un rea grande en una mina de carbn poco profunda. Los
resultados indican que el mtodo de diseo propuesto puede ser aplicado para prevenir
la subsidencia y a la vez obtener un alto coeficiente de recuperacin para operaciones
mineras de cmara y pilares.

Introduction
The main intention in using the
room-and-pillar mining method without pillar extraction is to avoid immediate and future surface subsidence.

Y. Luo is associate professor,

Department of Mining Engineering,
at West Virginia University,
Morgantown, WV. Paper number
TP-14-015. Original manuscript
submitted February 2014. Revised
manuscript accepted for publication
January 2015. Discussion of this
peer-reviewed and approved paper
is invited and must be submitted to
SME Publications by Oct. 31, 2015.

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However, surface subsidence does

occur over such mines, with some of
these unexpected subsidence events
occurring long after mining operations causing significant surface disturbances. In some cases, cascading
pillar failure had occurred over large
mine areas, causing substantial interruption to mining operations (Morsy
and Peng, 2001) and abrupt surface
subsidence events. Investigations of
such subsidence events often found
the root causes to be: (1) insufficiently sized pillars in the production panels and (2) failure of mine floor, roof
or pillar parting that are clay-rich and
can be greatly weakened by mine water (Luo, 2011). To eliminate the possibility of surface subsidence while
achieving reasonably high recovery

of the coal reserve, the room-and-pillar panel system should be properly

designed.
In this paper, a systematic roomand-pillar panel design method applying the pressure arch concept
incorporated with sufficiently sized
barrier pillars is proposed. The pillars in the production panel are designed to only carry the overburden
load under the pressure arch so that
a high recovery ratio can be achieved
in the panel. The larger barrier pillar
separating the adjacent production
panels is designed to withstand the
condition of extreme load, when the
pillars in the production panels fail
completely. Through a design optimization process while considering
common production practices, the
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Figure 1

Figure 2

Proposed room-and-pillar panel system design.

Pressure arch and pillar loading.

overall recovery of coal reserves from such a room-andpillar panel system can be maintained at a high level. With
the proposed methodology, the possibility of pillars in the
production panels failing is minimized and the effects
of any cascading pillar failure in the production panels
can be contained by the barrier pillars. Most importantly,
through this design approach, the possibility of immediate and future surface subsidence can be greatly reduced.

Wr, where Wr is the room width. The larger central pillars

can not only provide better protection to the belt entry
located between them but also carry the higher overburden load that is expected directly under the top of the
pressure arch. Wider barrier pillars are left between the
production panels to isolate any possible mining interactions from adjacent panels.

Design methodology

The layout of modern room-and-pillar mines has become increasingly like that of longwall mines, in which
rectangular production panels are separated by barrier
pillars. Using the traditional room-and-pillar panel design method, the recovery ratio in the production panels
is limited by a number of factors, the main one being the
overburden depth since each panel pillar is required to
carry the entire tributary overburden load with an acceptable safety factor. Among the possible shapes of panel
pillars, square pillars offer the highest load-carrying capacity per unit area of pillar and can thus achieve the best
reserve recovery for a given condition.
Different from the traditional design method, this
proposed design method considers the production panel
and its adjacent barrier pillars as a system. The width of
the production panel should be properly sized so that a
pressure arch over the production panel can still exist in
the competent overburden strata. Under such conditions,
the panel pillars only need to carry the overburden load
up to the pressure arch, so these pillars can be designed
smaller than those designed with the traditional method.
To make the pillar designs more rational both for production practices and for better utilization of the pillar
strength, a unique panel pillar design system as shown in
Fig. 1 is proposed. The majority of the panel pillars are
square in shape with size of W. Two lines of rectangular
pillars are left in the center of the panel and each of the
central pillars has width of W and length of Lc = 2W +
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Pressure arch theory. The concept of pressure arch applied in the design of the panel pillars had been proposed
for ground control in bedded strata as early as in the 1930s.
The theory suggests that a pressure arch is developed as
the result of redistribution of weight and a distressed zone
is formed under the pressure arch (Institution of Mining
Engineers, 1936). The beds under the pressure arch deflect slightly and no longer carry the weight of the superincumbent mass of strata. A pressure arch is thought to be
present in the roof above every mining excavation, with
the load of the superincumbent strata transferred to the
two abutments of the pressure arch (Institution of Mining
Engineers, 1949). Based on this concept, the pillars in the
production panel only need to carry the overburden load
under the pressure arch. The pressure arch formed over
a room-and-pillar panel is depicted in Fig. 2 and can be
mathematically defined as an ellipse function:
(1)
In this approach, the semi-minor and major axes of
the ellipse, a and b, are related by the angle of abutment,
, in the following equation. According to research by
the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and
Health (NIOSH), an abutment angle of 21 is appropriate for U.S. coal mines (Mark and Chase, 1997). In the
equation, a is one half of the width of the pressure arch
or the width of the production panel (Wp). The height of
the pressure arch (b) can be determined by the following simplified equation:

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Technical Papers
(2)
Therefore, the maximum allowable panel width for
the pressure arch to exist in the competent strata (Wmax)
can be determined by the thickness of the competent
strata (hc). The term hc is the overburden depth subtracting the thickness of unconsolidated materials near the
ground surface (Fig. 2). The height of the pressure arch at
x distance away from the panel center is then determined
by:
(3)
Panel pillar design. Using Eq. (1), the area of the
transverse cross-section under the pressure arch can be
analytically determined. The total overburden load to be
carried by the two lines of production pillars (shown as
the shaded area in Fig. 1) can be determined by the following equation, considering the average density of the
overburden strata to be :
(4)
When a proper panel width, Wp, is chosen, N entries
can be arranged in each half of the panel width excluding the central entry (belt entry) and N 1 lines of normal production pillars plus the central pillar will be left
in each half of the panel width. The load capacity of each
of the square production pillars can be determined by
applying the Bieniawski pillar strength formula (Bieniawski, 1981). It should be noted that other pillar strength
formulae can also be used in the design process according
to the users preference.
(5)
In the above equation, m is the height of the pillar
or the mining height in the coal seam. By converting a
rectangular central pillar of width W and length Lc into
an equivalent square pillar, the load capacity of a central
pillar can be determined using the following formula:

(6)
The in situ strength of the coal (i) in the two equations above can be determined from laboratory tests with
correction for the specimen size effect. However, based
on the recommendation of Mark and Chase (1997), 900
psi (6.2 MPa) can be used for i in most U.S. coal mines.
Furthermore, if clay-rich rock strata that can be weakened considerably by mine water are present in the immediate floor and roof or as pillar parting, i = 600 psi (4.1
MPa) can be used. The total pillar load capacity of the
two lines of production pillars and the two central pillars
(shaded area in Fig. 1) is then determined by substituting
the above two equations into the following equation:
(7)
To ensure the production panel does not fail, an adwww.miningengineeringmagazine.com

equate overall safety factor (SF) for the production and

central pillars should be specified in the design process,
resulting in the following design equation:
(8)
The user should pay close attention to the units used in
Eq. (8) and the subsequent Eqs. (10) and (11).
Since the room width (Wr) is normally specified in a
coal mining production, the only unknown variable to be
determined from Eq. (8) is the width of the square production pillars (W). Once W is determined, the size of the
central pillar is also defined according to the proposed
arrangement shown in Fig. 1). The recovery ratio in the
production panel can be determined by:
(9)
It should be noted that the pillar design in the production panel using this pressure arch concept is an iterative
process. It should start with a rational panel width (Wp)
that permits the fitting of 2N + 1 entries, 2(N 1) lines
of square production pillars and two lines of rectangular
central pillars in the panel, as shown in Fig. 1. The panel
width should be kept smaller than the maximum allowable panel width (Wmax) so that the top of the pressure
arch still remains within the competent strata in the overburden. It should also be noted that the recovery ratio in
the production panel is not necessarily the best when the
panel is designed up to the maximum allowable width.
In order to achieve a good recovery ratio under the given conditions, the panel width should be varied within a
range practical for room-and-pillar mining operations.
As the pillars in the production panel are sized, the
safety factor of the individual pillars should also be
checked. For the central pillars, the safety factor is determined using:
(10)

For a production pillar in the ith line from the central

pillar, its safety factor can be determined using:
(11)

The safety factors for the pillars in the production

panel vary with distance from the panel center. Due to
the proposed special pillar design, the longer rectangular
central pillars should have a safety factor higher than the
overall safety factor specified in the design of the production pillars. Figure 3 shows the resulting safety factors of
the central and production pillars when the overall safety
factor specified in the design is 1.3. Generally, the first line
of the production pillars beside the central pillars has the
lowest safety factor. If any of the resulting safety factors
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Figure 3
Variation of pillar safety factor.

Figure 4
Types of barrier pillar system.

Figure 5
Inputs and outputs from an example of room-and-pillar panel
design.

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is significantly less than 1.0, a higher overall safety factor

should be specified and the production panel should be
redesigned.
Design of barrier pillar system. The barrier pillar
system separating two adjacent room-and-pillar panels
should be much wider than the pillars inside the production panels. It should be designed to carry the entire
overburden load in the extreme condition, should all
the pillars in the adjacent production panels have failed
completely as proposed by Zipf (2008), with safety factor
of 1.0. The extreme load to be carried by the barrier pillar is determined as the entire overburden depth within
a distance of the total width of the barrier pillar system
and the load above the pressure arch. The strength of the
barrier pillars is determined by applying the Bieniawski
formula. It should be noted that the barrier pillar system
designed in such way is extremely strong. A strong barrier
pillar system will provide two benefits for mine safety and
operations: (1) it serves as the foundation of the pressure
arches to ensure their stability, and (2) it contains any failure of the production pillars within the panel.
There are commonly three types of barrier pillar systems used in room-and-pillar mines to separate adjacent
panels (Fig. 4): (1) a continuous wide barrier pillar without crosscuts, (2) one line of wide barrier pillars separated
by crosscuts, and (3) two lines of barrier pillars separated
by a center entry and crosscuts. For the latter two types,
the spacing of the crosscuts should be specified in the design first.
Design optimization process. When the production
and barrier pillars of a room-and-pillar panel are designed according to the prescribed procedure with sufficient safety factors, it basically eliminates the cause for
surface subsidence. Therefore, if a room-and-pillar mining operation is conducted according to panel design using the proposed method, the possibility of immediate
and future surface subsidence should be very small. When
this is assured, the objective is to maximize the overall
recovery ratio of the coal reserve in the designed panel.
The design optimization goes through an iterative
process with user input. It starts with a width of the production panel that ensures the existence of pressure arch
in the competent strata. The size and the number of lines
of pillars to fit in the production panel are determined.
The width of the production panel is re-determined, and
the recovery ratio in the panel is calculated. Based on the
panel width, the size of the chosen type of barrier pillar
system should be determined. The overall recovery ratio
for the room-and-pillar panel, defined as the ratio of total
area of rooms in the panel and in the barrier pillar system
to the total area of a panel, is calculated. A spreadsheet
program was developed in MS Excel, using its optimization feature to carry out the design process. Figure 5
shows the inputs and outputs from a sample execution of
the design program. The inputs are basic geometric information, geomechanical properties and the safety factor
for the production pillars. After the iterative optimization
process, design parameters such as sizes of production and
barrier pillars, number of entries and width of the produc-

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Technical Papers
tion panel are determined, and the resulting recovery ratios in the production panel and overall are shown. The
example has an overall recovery ratio of 60.65 percent.
For comparison, the recovery ratio using the traditional
pillar design method without applying the pressure arch
concept for the same conditions was calculated, and the
recovery ratio of the new design method was found to be
about 5 percent higher than that of the traditional design
method.

Case demonstration

Morsy and Peng (2001) documented a cascading

pillar failure event in a room-and-pillar mine. The coal
seam was about 6 ft (1.8 m) long. The overburden depth
ranged from 300 to 550 ft (91 to 168 m). The immediate
mine roof was thick shale while the immediate floor had
thin claystone or fireclay underlain by a thick layer of
sandstone or sandy shale. The mine layout is shown in
Fig. 6. The pillars in the 10-entry mains were 30 by 50 ft
(9 by 15 m). The mine rooms were all 20 ft (6 m) wide.
The mining height was 8.5 ft (2.59 m) including extracting 2.5 ft (0.8 m) of the immediate roof. There were 11
panels mined from right to left as shown in the figure.
There was no barrier pillar left between the production
panels and the mains. The dimensions of the pillars and
rooms in the first eight production panels were the same
as those in the mains. Each of the panels had eight lines
of pillars, so the panel width was 420 ft (128 m). However, the pillars in the last three production panels (that
is, Panels 9, 10 and 11) were apparently smaller than
those in the other panels about 15 by 44 ft (4.6 by 13.4
m) and the panel width was about 300 ft (91 m). The
recovery ratio in the first eight production panels was
57.1 percent and that in the last three panels was about
70.5 percent. Super-section mining technique was practiced in mining the panels. No pillar retreating operation
was practiced in the mine. Various sizes of barrier pillars
between the panels were used. The width of the solid

barrier pillar between Panels 4 and 5 was 60 ft (18.3 m)

while that between Panels 5 and 6 was 30 ft (9 m). There
was no barrier pillar from Panels 6 to 8. From Panels 8
to 11, the barrier pillars were 30 by 50 ft (9 by 15 m). Because of the slightly dipping seam toward the northwest,
water was always found on the floor at the inby end of
Production Panels 3 through 11.
A massive cascading pillar failure event occurred in
the mine. Rib sloughing and roof-to-floor convergence
was suddenly observed around the belt transfer point (T
in Fig. 6). Thereafter, rib sloughing and entry convergence
continued and propagated outby. Within 12 hours after
initial observation, heavy rib sloughing and entry convergence were visible at the mouths of Panels 9 through 11.
Within 24 hours, the event had propagated to and stopped
at a location marked as S in Fig. 6.
Because of the relatively large panel width (420 ft, or
128 m) in a relatively shallow area (300 to 550 ft, or 91
to 168 m), a pressure arch would not exist over each of
the panels. In the area where the cascading pillar failure
initiated, the smaller pillars in the production panels were
unable to carry the tributary load imposed on them even
without considering the waters weakening effect on the
clay-stone and fireclay in the immediate mine floor. The
pillar safety factor in those three production panels was
back-calculated to be about 0.85, even using 300 ft (91
m) overburden. When the pillars in the production panel
began to fail completely, the barrier pillars separating the
panels only had a safety factor of about 0.19, definitely
insufficient to contain the propagation of the cascading
pillar failure within the individual panel.
The proposed design method was then used to determine two sets of room-and-pillar panel designs for overburden depths of 300 and 550 ft (91 and 168 m), respectively. In each of the designs, conservative coal strength
of 600 psi (4.1 MPa) for soft floor (Chandrashekar et al.,
1987) was used, with a line of rectangular barrier pillars,
50 ft (15.2 m) long, to separate the adjacent panels. The

Figure 6
A room-and-pillar mine with cascading pillar failure (Morsy and Peng, 2001).

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Figure 7
Panel designs using the new method for the minimum and maximum overburden depths.

design results are shown in Fig. 7.

For the minimum overburden depth shown on the
left-hand side of Fig. 7, each panel contains four lines of
pillars and five entries. Each of the square pillars in the
production panel is 26.3 ft (8 m) wide so the width of the
production panel is 205 ft (62 m). The recovery ratio in
the panel is nearly 65.4 percent. The barrier pillar is 31.5
ft (9.6 m) wide. With this design, the overall recovery ratio
for the panel (excluding pillars in bleeder system and the
barrier pillar beside the mains) is about 60.5 percent.
For the maximum overburden shown on the righthand side of Fig. 7, the production panel width is 310 ft
(95 m), fitting six lines of production pillars and seven entries. The square pillars in the production panel are 28.3 ft
(8.6 m) wide. The recovery ratio in the panel is about 64
percent. The barrier pillars are 93.3 ft (28.4 m) wide. The
overall recovery ratio is nearly 56 percent.
In both design cases, the widths of the production panels are smaller than those in the documented case. The
smaller panels make it hard to employ the super-section
technique in mining these panels. However, because of
these smaller panel widths, the pillars do not carry the
full overburden load, increasing their safety factors. The
larger barrier pillars are more capable of containing pillar
failures, if any, in the production panel so that the cascading pillar failure can be prevented. The recovery ratios
in the production panels (64 to 65.4 percent) are higher
than those of the panels with larger production pillars
(57.1 percent) in the original case. In the last three panels,
though the determined recovery ratio from the mine map
is higher than those resulting from the design program,
the cascading pillar failure event also originated in these
panels. Due to these benefits, the strata movement caused
by pillar failure in the production panel would not propagate beyond the pressure arch and consequently would
not cause surface subsidence.

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Conclusions
A new panel design methodology for underground
room-and-pillar coal mines is proposed. The concept of
pressure arch theory was applied in the systematic design
process, considering panel width and sizes of the panel
and barrier pillars. By specifying a sufficient safety factor
for the pillars, the pillars in the production panel are unlikely to fail. Even if some pillars fail unexpectedly in the
panel, the strata movement will be contained under the
pressure arch to eliminate the possibility of immediate
and future surface subsidence. The barrier pillar system
separating the production panels is designed to withstand
the condition of extreme load for maintaining the pressure arch. With an optimization process, higher overall recovery ratio than that resulting from conventional design
can be achieved.

References

Bieniawski, Z.T., 1981, Improved design of coal pillars for U.S. mining conditions,
Proceedings of the 1st Annual Conference on Ground Control in Mining, S.S.
Peng, ed., pp. 13-22.
Chandrashekar, K., Nath, R., and Tandon, S., 1987, Design of coal pillars under weak
floor conditions, Proceedings of the 28th Symposium on Rock Mechanics,
Tucson, AZ, pp. 1073-1081.
Institution of Mining Engineers, 1936, Third progress report of investigation into
causes of falls, and accidents due to falls in bord and pillar whole workings
Roof fracture control in bords, Trans Inst Min Eng, Vol. 90, No. 4, pp. 241-242.
Institution of Mining Engineers, 1949, Seventh progress report of investigation into
causes of falls and accidents due to falls Improvement of working conditions
by controlled transference of roof load, Trans Inst Min Eng, Vol. 108, No. 11,
pp. 489-504.
Luo, Y., 2011, Investigation of subsidence events over inactive room and pillar
mines, Transactions of the Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration, Vol.
330, pp. 479-489.
Mark, C., and Chase, F.E., 1997, Analysis of retreat mining pillar stability (ARMPS),
Proceedings of New Technology for Ground Control in Retreat Mining, NIOSH,
Pittsburgh, PA, pp. 17-34.
Morsy, K. and Peng, S.S., 2001, Mine panel failure A case study, Transactions of
the Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration, Vol. 301, pp. 11-19.
Zipf, R.K., and Mark, C., 2008, Ground Control Design for Highwall Mining, NIOSH, 5 pp.

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