An improved hardening-damage creep model of lean coal: a theoretical and experimental study

Creep is an important rheological behavior of coal, impacting pillar stability, gateway support performance, and construction costs in underground mining. It is of great significance to study the creep mechanism of coal to prevent creep failure. In this paper, uniaxial compressive creep tests of raw lean coal under multiple stages are conducted, the increasing instantaneous elastic modulus and decreasing viscosity coefficient are calculated to analyze the hardening-damage creep mechanism of coal, and some new conclusions are as follows. When the stress is low, the hardening effect exists, and coal strain shows an instantaneous response. At high stress, both the damage effect and hardening effect work and coal strain shows time-dependent transient creep and steady creep. During multistage creep, coal is first hardened, then weakened, and finally fails due to well-developed cracks. Based on the strain evolution laws of lean coal at different stress levels, an elastic viscous-plastic model is established, and the hardening function and damage function are introduced into the model to obtain an improved hardening-damage creep model. This model is used to fit the creep data, and the model curves match the testing data very well, showing much better accuracy than other models. This model is simple with clear physical meanings of the elements and can reflect the nonlinear hardening-damage creep of raw lean coal under uniaxial compression very well.