Abstract

To better understand the coupling of thermal (T), hydraulic (H) and mechanical (M) processes (T-H-M processes) and their influence on the system behaviour, models allowing T-H-M coupling are developed. These models allow simulations in the near-field of the system. Such a model has been developed within the simulator RockFlow/RockMech. This paper concentrates on the thermal and hydraulic processes. For those processes, the material parameters and state variables are highly non-linear and mostly functions of temperature, saturation and pressure. This paper shows how these dependencies are formulated mathematically and are implemented into RockFlow/RockMech. The implementation allows phase changes between the fluid phases (gas and liquid) to occur explicitly. The model allows the simulation of very low permeability clays with high capillary pressures. An example for code validation is shown, where low permeability clay is desaturated, lastly, current work on the calculations performed in the near field study (BMT1) of the DECOVALEX III project is outlined.

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