Abstract: Shendong Mine Area is mining in the shallow depth seams and the room mining method results in a lot of residual pillars, which incline to be instability and caving suddenly induced by the nether seam mining, and cause shock type dynamic disasters, hence the stability of the residual pillars have significant implications for the nether seam mining safely. According to the geological and production conditions of Shigetai Mine, Wulan Group, we applied mutation theory to establish a cusp mutation model for studying the room mining residual pillars’ stability, and discussed the mutation instability rules of the room mining residual pillars in the shallow depth seam. The necessary condition for pillar mutation is that when the hemi-yield width in the scope of 0.33~0.43 of the overall width, the pillar will be mutation instability. Finally the calculation results have conformed to the observations.

Key words: shallow depth seams, room mining, residual pillar, mutation theory, coal pillar stability