A simple model to represent damage and fracturing in rock salt caused by heating and subsequent cooling: Understanding brine inflow data from the Brine Availability Test in Salt (BATS)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Salt deposits are being considered in several countries as potential host rocks for deep geological disposal facilities (GDFs) for radioactive waste. Although the very low porosity and lack of water content are favorable properties of salt that make it well-suited for this purpose, brine is present in amounts that are not insignificant when considering potential corrosion of waste canisters and pathways for radionuclide migration. It is therefore important to understand the processes and mechanisms that can cause brine to flow into the GDF. In this paper a relatively simple model is described that represents damage and fracturing in rock salt caused by heating and subsequent cooling. The model is used to simulate brine inflow to a heated borehole, using data from the Brine Availability Test in Salt (BATS) which was carried out at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico, USA. Key characteristics of BATS and other, similar, experiments are increased brine production during periods of elevated temperature and a very large but short-lived increase shortly after the heat source is removed. The latter is not directly relevant to the disposal of heat-generating radioactive waste, where the heat source will gradually diminish over time, but the ability to simulate this phenomenon demonstrates an understanding of the coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical (THM) processes that operate in salt-based systems. The modelling demonstrates that a certain level of complexity is needed (such as the inclusion of viscoplastic effects and damage) to capture the key behaviors, but complexity can be tailored to the purposes of the study. In this case, a 1D model and a simple representation of the damage directly linked to permeability change was sufficient to gain a detailed understanding of the system. This includes the importance of the excavation damage zone (EDZ) in controlling the availability of brine. • The ability to model the impact of temperature changes on brine availability in salt-based geological disposal facilities is important in demonstrating an understanding of the coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical (THM) processes that operate in such systems. • Viscoplastic effects are an important mechanism that are needed to capture key behavior when heating is stopped. • Model complexity (e.g. the representation of micro-cracking and damage) can be tailored to the purposes of the study. • The engineered damage zone (EDZ) surrounding excavations plays a key role in controlling the availability of brine.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".