Analytical and numerical solutions on the response of pore pressure to cyclic atmospheric loading: with application to Horonobe underground research laboratory, Japan

Abstract

During the long-term stability assessment of underground disposal repositories buried in sedimentary formations, one of crucial scientific problems is to determine parameters of site formations. The analysis of response of the pore pressure due to atmospheric loading provides a possible way of accurate estimation of formation parameters. In this paper, an analytical solution of response of the pore pressure to atmospheric loading was derived starting from the Biot’s poroelasticity, and its corresponding numerical solutions were developed by finite element methods for 1D and 2D situations. With comparison to the analytical solution, the experimental results show that the numerical schemes sound reasonable to implement the assessment of response of the pore pressure in horizontal multilayer sedimentary formations. In particular, it is effective for a 2D model over large area with consideration of background horizontal groundwater flow. A highlight of this work is to construct a reasonable approach to capture responses of the pore pressure to atmospheric loading, and at the same time to provide the feasibility of integrated analysis of well monitoring data of pore pressure variance in Horonobe Underground Research Laboratory (URL), Hokkaido, Japan.