Study of the Effect of the Massive Damage Due Creep of Evaporite During the Extraction of Salt

A usual form of extraction of minerals is the conventional room and pillars method. In this approach, the challenge lies in extracting as much mineral as possible while insuring safety in the rooms. In order to do so, pillars should be dimensioned with maximum deformation control. That is why a thorough description of rock behavior is important. In material sciences the creep concept is adopted to describe the tendency of a material to deform under mechanical stress over time. The account of events detachment of large plate and fall of blocks in a salt mine brings instability and insecurity in the excavations of the salt mines. In short, the mechanical interaction in the immediate vicinity of the room must be characterized with a local modeling, as to identify the risk combination of presence layer of clay levels and the redistribution of stresses due to different mechanical behavior of evaporites and hard rock. The objective of this study is to determine the effect of the massive damage due to rock salt creep during the extraction of salt through numerical simulation with the use of a finite element programs named, CODE_BRIGHT (t).