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During cavern leaching in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), injected raw water mixes with resident brine and eventually interacts with the cavern salt walls. This report provides a record of data acquired during a series of experiments designed to measure the leaching rate of salt walls in a labscale simulated cavern, as well as discussion of the data. These results should be of value to validate computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models used to simulate leaching applications. Three experiments were run in the transparent 89-cm (35-inch) ID diameter vessel previously used for several related projects. Diagnostics included tracking the salt wall dissolution rate using ultrasonics, an underwater camera to view pre-installed markers, and pre- and post-test weighing and measuring salt blocks that comprise the walls. In addition, profiles of the local brine/water conductivity and temperature were acquired at three locations by traversing conductivity probes to map out the mixing of injected raw water with the surrounding brine. The data are generally as expected, with stronger dissolution when the salt walls were exposed to water with lower salt saturation, and overall reasonable wall shape profiles. However, there are significant block-to-block variations, even between neighboring salt blocks, so the averaged data are considered more useful for model validation. The remedial leach tests clearly showed that less mixing and longer exposure time to unsaturated water led to higher levels of salt wall dissolution. The data for all three tests showed a dividing line between upper and lower regions, roughly above and below the fresh water injection point, with higher salt wall dissolution in all cases, and stronger (for remedial leach cases) or weaker (for standard leach configuration) concentration gradients above the dividing line. |
