Quantitative Prediction for Deformation and Brine Extraction in Salt Solution Mining Based on Water-Solution Kinetic (WSK) InSAR Model

Abstract

Long-term deformation prediction and quantitative brine estimation are of great significance for safety precautions and environmental protection in salt mining areas. Traditional interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) combined with probability integral method (PIM) has the following limitations: mathematical empirical models are mostly used in InSAR deformation modeling, which ignore the mechanisms of underground mining and thus may limit the accuracy of deformation observations; InSAR deformation models have theoretical contradictions and inconsistencies with the future prediction models; and PIM is not applicable to the deformation induced by salt solution mining. In this article, a novel water-solution kinetic (WSK) InSAR model was proposed to replace the traditional InSAR models. It considers the principles of substance diffusion and mass transfer of salt, and thus can be used directly for the quantitative prediction of both the deformations and extracted brine. Least squares with inequality constraints were introduced to solve the unknown WSK parameters based on the InSAR phases to improve the computational efficiency. Two salt mines in China were selected for the experiments. The results show that the maximum predicted deformation was 296 mm in Xinhua Rock Mine and 155 mm in Huai'an Rock Mine, and the brine composition was estimated to be 0.406 and 1.477 million tons per year, respectively. Compared to traditional Static-PIM, the accuracy was improved by 48.3% and 54.5%, respectively. The results indicated that WSK is more precise and reasonable for predicting the deformation in salt mining areas, which can provide data reference for the management of salt mines.

Keywords

• Brine estimation or prediction
• deformation prediction
• interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR)
• salt mining area
• water-solution kinetic (WSK)