Abstract: Compared with the traditional earth rock dam,the tailing dams have smaller compacting degree and poor particle grading,so it is a man-made high potential material source for debris flow.The dry pile method and wet pile method of constructing tailings dam will lead to the change of stress and strain of tailings dam,which affects the safety and stability of tailings dams.In this paper,taking the tailing pond of Weilongzhou in Panzhihua City as an example,a three-dimensional finite element model was established by using the finite element software ANSYS.The seepage characteristics of the tailing pond were inversed by hydrological data,and the differences of settlement deformation induced by the dry pile method and the wet pile method were quantified under the same rolling condition.The numerical simulation results showed that under the same working condition of this project,the seepage effect inside the dam body of wet pile method would cause larger settlement,and with the increase of the stacking height,the additional settlement generated by the wet pile method would be more,namely about 10 cm settlement every 15 m of the filling elevation,and the uneven settlement occurred due to the varied pile thickness in different dam areas.The stress analysis showed that the wet pile method was more likely to produce tensile stress area on the dam surface,so it was suggested that the high tailings dam should be filled by the dry pile method,and the groundwater level inside the dam body should be strictly controlled to ensure that the settlement of the dam is within an allowable range.