Long-Term Mechanical Behavior of Yucca Mountain Tuff and its Variability, Final Technical Report for Task ORD-FY04-021

Abstract

The study of the long term mechanical behavior of Yucca Mountain tuffs is important for several reasons. Long term stability of excavations will affect accessibility (e.g. for inspection purposes), and retrievability. Long term instabilities may induce loading of drip shields and/or emplaced waste, thus affecting drip shield and/or waste package corrosion. Failure of excavations will affect airflow, may affect water flow, and may affect temperature distributions. The long term mechanical behavior of rocks remains an elusive topic, loaded with uncertainties. A variety of approaches have been used to improve the understanding of this complex subject, but it is doubtful that it has reached a stage where firm predictions can be considered feasible. The long term mechanical behavior of "soft" rocks, especially evaporites, and in particular rock salt, has been the subject of numerous investigations (e.g. Cristescu and Hunsche, 1998, Cristescu et al, 2002), and basic approaches towards engineering taking into account the long term behavior of such materials have long been well established (e.g. Dreyer, 1972, 1982). The same is certainly not true of "hard" rocks. While it long has been recognized that the long term strength of ?hard? rocks almost certainly is significantly less than that measured during "short", i.e. standard (ASTM D 2938), ISRM suggested (Bieniawski et al, 1978) and conventionally used test procedures (e.g. Bieniawski, 1970, Wawersik, 1972, Hoek and Brown, 1980, p. 150), what limited approaches have been taken to develop strategies toward determining the long term mechanical behavior of "hard" rock remain in the early research and investigation stage, at best. One early model developed specifically for time dependent analysis of underground "hard" rock structures is the phenomenological model by Kaiser and Morgenstern (1981). Brady and Brown (1985, p. 93) state that over a wide range of strain rates, from 10^-8 to 10^2/s the difference in strength is only a factor of 2, and that "the observed behavior of rock is not significantly influenced by varying the strain rate within the range that is convenient to use in quasi-static laboratory compression tests." While this is undoubtedly true, it does not really address the question as to whether or not strengths thus measured can be considered appropriate for estimating long term strengths. One objective of this investigation was to evaluate the applicability of the approaches by Cruden (e.g. Cruden, 1971, 1974, 1983, 1987) and by Lajtai (e.g. Lajtai and Schmidtke, 1986, 1987) to the prediction of the long term mechanical behavior of the investigated tuffs. This involves in particular static fatigue testing, by conducting uniaxial, triaxial, and indirect splitting (Brazilian) tests over a wide range of strain (or stress, or displacement) rates.