CONCEPT OF LARGE-SCALE THERMOMECHANICAL URL EXPERIMENTS IN THE NIZHNEKANSKIY ROCK MASSIF .

Numerical simulation of thermomechanical processes in a deep underground radioactive waste repository requires information on the host rock and the engineered barriers properties at a scale of dozens of centimeters, meters and more. However, the extrapolation of the values obtained on small-scale samples in surface laboratories yields excessive uncertainties. The materials behavior is also influenced by conditions that cannot be reliably reproduced in a surface laboratory, such as water content or initial stress-strain state. Following experiments are planned to study the host rock and the engineered barriers behavior during heating under conditions similar to those expected in the repository, as well as to assess their large-scale thermomechanical properties. In the experiment focused on the excavation damaged zone thermal mechanics, the behavior of reinforced drift walls and vaults under heating will be studied. 

Keywords: radioactive waste, deep geological repository, thermal mechanics, experiment, underground research laboratory, host rock, engineered barriers.

Moiseenko E. V., Drobyishevsky N. I., Butov R. A., Tokarev Yu. N. Concept of Large-scale Thermomechanical URL Experiments in the Nizhnekanskiy Rock Massif. Radioactive Waste, 2020, no. 3 (12), pp. 101—111. (In Russian). DOI: 10.25283/2587-9707-2020-3-101-111.