Transport thermo-hydro-mechanics

Our activities on development of the coupled T-H-M-C code and further demonstration analysis are presented by Neyama et al. in GeoProc 2003 conference, entitled Prototype Code Development for Numerical Experiments on the Coupled Thermo-Hydro-Mechanical and Chemical Processes in the Near-field of a High-level Radioactive Waste Repository . The prototype code is based on the coupled T-H-M code, mass transport code and geochemical code which have been well verified and validated through benchmark tests and various experiments, and... 

Abstract motif is a three-dimensional finite-element code developed to simulate groundwater flow, heat transfer and solute transport in deformable fractured porous media. The code has been subjected to an extensive verification and updating programme since the onset of its development. In this paper, additional verification and validation works with an emphasis on thermo-hydro-mechanical processes are presented. The verification results are based on cases designed to verify thermo-hydro-mechanical coupling terms, and isothermal and non-isothermal consolidations. A number of validation case studies have been conducted on the code. Example results are repotted in this paper. 

The six verification tests presented in this paper, along with other verification tests presented in the cited literature, have established the ability of the MOTIF finite-element code to accurately solve the equations of groundwater flow, solute and heat transport, and coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical phenomena in porous media, or in fractured media that can be adequately characterized by equivalent porous media (EPM) elements or a combination of EPM and discrete fracture elements. 

The numerical code used is the finite element program CODE BRlGHT. It is based on a mathematical formulation that combines an already existent thermo-hydro-mechanical formulation (Olivella et al., 1995) with the reactive transport equations in a fully coupled way (Guimaraes, 2002). 

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