An InSAR-Based Temporal Probability Integral Method and its Application for Predicting Mining-Induced Dynamic Deformations and Assessing Progressive Damage to Surface Buildings

Surface deformations caused by underground mining are time-dependent and highly nonlinear, and can result in progressive damage to surface structures during underground extraction. However, the previous methods based on the interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) technique are generally incapable of accurately predicting the mining-induced dynamic deformations occurring during the entire period of underground extraction, due to the inaccurate model parameters inverted under the condition of ignoring the horizontal motions of the InSAR-derived measurements and the model errors for predicting dynamic deformations. Consequently, the risk of mining-related structural damage cannot be reliably assessed based on the deformations predicted by the previous InSAR-based methods. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel method that combines InSAR with a new mining deformation model: the temporal probability integral method (TPIM). Theoretically, the integration of InSAR and TPIM allows the InSAR-TPIM to accurately predict mining-induced dynamic deformations occurring in the entire period of underground extraction. Furthermore, InSAR-TPIM can reliably assess mining-related progressive structural damage based on the predicted dynamic deformations. However, these advantages cannot be achieved by the previous InSAR-based methods. The Qianyingzi coal mining area of China is selected to test the proposed method. The results demonstrate that the accuracies of the predicted dynamic deformations are about 0.030 and 0.041 m in the horizontal and vertical directions, respectively, which can meet the accuracy requirements of mining-induced dynamic deformation prediction. Furthermore, the comparison between the potential structural damage predicted by the proposed method and the previous InSAR-based methods indicates that the damage risks of around 131 buildings (43.9% of the 298 buildings) are underestimated by the previous InSAR-based method.