The use of salt rock for underground radioactive waste disposal facilities requires a comprehensive analysis of the creep-damage process in salt rock. A computer-controlled creep setup was employed to carry out a creep test of salt rock that lasted as long as 359 days under a constant uniaxial stress. The acoustic emission (AE) space-time evolution and energy-releasing characteristics during the creep test were studied in the meantime. A new creep-damage model is proposed on the basis of a fractional derivative by combining the AE statistical regularity. It indicates that the AE data in the non-decay creep process of salt rock can be divided into three stages. Furthermore, the authors propose a new creep-damage model of salt rock based on a fractional derivative. The parameters in the model were determined by the Quasi-Newton method. The fitting analysis suggests that the new creep-damage model provides a precise description of full creep regions in salt rock.

Investigating the stress drop of abutment pressure is the key to a deep quantitative analysis of the discontinuous stress redistribution under mining. In the present study, uniaxial and triaxial compression tests are carried out separately to determine the bulk and shear moduli, the cohesion, and the internal friction angle of the coal samples. By extending the meaning of Mohr’s circle referring to yield stress instead of the maximum principal stress, a yield line is introduced to illustrate the stress drop of Mohr’s circle referring to yield stress instead of the maximum principal stress at the elastoplastic boundary. Furthermore, a theoretical solution of the stress drop as a function of the damage is proposed to investigate how the abutment pressure differs considering the yield line and failure line. In addition, applying the stress drop at the yield line in non-pillar mining, top coal mining, and protective coal mining shows that the damage has a nonlinearly positive influence on the stress drop. The results shows that the bulk modulus and internal friction angle have a more sensitive influence on the stress drop than do the shear modulus and cohesion. Finally, the stress drop is divided into a discontinuous stress drop at the yield line and a structural stress drop at the failure line. The stress drop is effective in describing the discontinuous stress redistribution and shows a clear difference in the movement direction of Mohr’s circle considering the unloading pressure.