Development of a stress-based approach for achieving the risk assessment of fault-related coal and gas outburst

In underground mining, gas accumulation or gas content anomaly caused by geological structures often results in catastrophic coal and gas outburst accidents, this kind of outburst has already been reported for decades and caused thousands of casualties. However, so far there have been very few studies about how to conduct risk assessment for this kind of geological-structure-related outburst. In this study, our aim is to develop an approach to evaluate the risk of fault-related outburst. The approach developed in this study is a stress-based approach and it considers the associated factors including the gas pressure, the fault attitude and the tectonic stresses. The fault-related outburst index proposed in this work not only can be used for evaluating the fault sealing capability but also can be used for quantitatively assessing the risk degree of fault-related outburst. It is a practical approach and can be recommended to apply in more underground engineering.