Self-Sealing of Boom Clay After Gas Transport

On the Thermal Consolidation of Boom Clay

When a mass of saturated clay is heated, as in the case of host soils surrounding nuclear waste disposals at great depth, the thermal expansion of the constituents generates excess pore pressures. The mass of clay is submitted to gradients of pore pressure and temperature, to hydraulic and thermal flows, and to changes in its mechanical properties. In this work, some of these aspects were exper...

Hydrogeological modeling of radionuclide transport in low permeability media: a comparison between Boom Clay and Ypresian Clay

Safe disposal of nuclear waste is an important environmental challenge. Several countries are investigating deep geological disposal as a long-term solution for their high-level waste. In Belgium, the Oligocene Boom Clay is the reference host formation for research purposes and for the safety and feasibility assessment of the deep disposal of high-level and/or long-lived radioactive waste. The ...

China’s Elusive Shale Gas Boom

Hollow cylinder simulation experiments of galleries in Boom Clay formation

In the context of nuclear waste disposal in clay formations, laboratory experiments were performed to study at reduced scale the Excavation Damaged Zone (EDZ) induced by the construction of galleries in the Boom Clay formation. For this purpose, thick-walled hollow cylindrical samples were subjected (after recovery of in-situ stress conditions) to a decrease of the inner confining pressure aimi...

Predictive Control of Gas Injection in Natural Gas Transport Networks

The present sought to draw a comparison between Model Predictive Control performance and two other controllers named Simple PI and Selective PI in controlling large-scale natural gas transport networks. A nonlinear dynamic model of representative gas pipeline was derived from pipeline governing rules and simulated in SIMULINK® environment of MATLAB®. Control schemes were designed to provide a s...