Analysis of Coupled Thermo-Hydro-Mechanical Simulations of a Generic Nuclear Waste Repository in Clay Rock Using Fiber Surfaces

Abstract

The use of clean and renewable energy and the abandoning of fossil energy have become goals of many national and international energy policies. But even when once accomplished, mankind has to take charge of the relics of the current energy supply system. For example, due to its harmful effects, nuclear waste has to be isolated from the biosphere safely and for sufficiently long times. The geological subsurface is considered as a promising option for the deposition of such by-or end products. In order to investigate the long-term evolution of a repository system, a multiphysics simulation was performed. It combines the structural mechanics of the host rock, the fluid dynamics of formation fluids, and the thermodynamics of all materials resulting in a highly multivariate data set. A visualization of such multiphysics data challenges the current methodology. In this article, we demonstrate how an analysis of a carefully selected subset of the variables in attribute space allows to visualize and interpret the simulation data. We apply a fiber surface extraction algorithm to explore the relationships between these variables. Studying the temporal evolution in attribute space, we found a regionally bulge that could be identified as an effect of the nuclear waste repository because it can be clearly separated from the natural geophysical state prior to waste disposal. Furthermore, we used the extracted fiber surface as a starting point to examine the distribution of other variables inside this area of the physical domain. We conclude this case study with lessons learned from the visualization as well as the geotechnical side.