Coupled Modelling for Clay

Investigation of the Callovo-Oxfordian clay unit as a potential hostrock for a geological repository for radioactive waste at Andra’s Meuse/Haute-Marne underground research laboratory in France.

Description of project:

 As part of the investigation of the Callovo-Oxfordian clay unit as a potential hostrock for a geological repository for radioactive waste at Meuse/Haute-Marne underground research laboratory in France, ÅF performs highly complex numerical model calculations and sensitivity analyses on our in-house cluster. Our client for this project, which has been ongoing for over a decade, is Andra, the French national radioactive waste management agency.

Using the specialized numerical modelling code TOUGH2-MP, the studies cover time periods of 1 million years. The challenges of running full-scale 3D models of the planned underground repositories required the development of a modular approach to numerically modelling the coupled flow and transport of both hydrogen and heat on the scale of an entire repository while simultaneously considering small scale structures.

ÅF's services:

• Numerical model development
• Coupled modelling of flow and transport
• Model conceptualization and realization with TOUGH2-MP
• Sensitivity analyses
• High-performance computing