Abstract
Air‐injection tests are being used to characterize the flow characteristics of the fractured volcanic tuffs at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, the proposed site for a high‐level nuclear waste repository. As the air component flows mainly in the heterogeneous fracture system, air‐injection tests can be used to determine the hydrological properties and parameters of the fracture networks. In situ air‐injection tests have been carried out in 30 boreholes drilled in a fractured rock block of 13 × 21.5 × 18 m3 in the underground facility at Yucca Mountain. These in situ field tests consist of a constant rate flow injection in one of the boreholes, while the pressure response is monitored in all 30 boreholes of the rock block. This paper presents a simultaneous inversion for 21 air‐injection tests in 21 separate boreholes using TOUGH2, a three‐dimensional numerical code for multiphase, multicomponent transport [Pruess, 1991; Pruess et al., 1996]. Spatially variable fracture permeability is used as an adjustable parameter to fit the measured pressure responses. For most of the pneumatic experiments the calculated pressure changes match the measured data well. Estimated permeabilities range over 5 orders of magnitude, from 10−15 to 8 × 10−11 m2, indicating large spatial variability in permeability of the heterogeneous fracture system.
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