Abstract：In order to determine the stability and the safety of the ventilating shaft affected by mining,the stress difference method is proposed. Taking a parallelepiped in overburden,the hexahedron must exist six strain components in mining. the six strain components can be calculated by the derived mathematical expressions. On this basis,three principal strain are deduced and the stress difference is obtained by using the D-P criterion. If the stress difference is greater than zero,it indicates that this point is not destoryed; if the stress difference equal to zero,it indicates that this point is in a critical state; if the stress difference is smaller than zero,it indicates that this point is destoryed. The Xiangshan coal mine measurement and calculation results show that the expected error is small,the method has a certain reliability.

Keyword：probability integral method;strain components;stress difference;D-P criterion;