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The main objective of this article is to present a new approach to model coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical problems considering geomaterials with heterogeneous properties. This approach has been implemented in the software CODE_BRIGHT and it provides the possibility of considering geomaterials with a spatially correlated heterogeneous field of porosity, following a normal distribution. This spatial correlation can be isotropic or anisotropic. An important feature of this approach is that material properties such as intrinsic permeability, thermal conductivity, diffusivity, retention curve, elastic modulus or cohesion are defined as a function of porosity and, thus, they become heterogeneous with spatial correlation and, eventually, anisotropic. A validation exercise and other basic numerical examples have been carried out to illustrate the possibilities of the proposed approach. The results, which have been compared with a homogeneous case, show that considering heterogeneous fields can be relevant in different modelling problems, especially coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical problems. This research was supported by the CODE_BRIGHT Project (CIMNE, International Centre for Numerical Methods in Engineering) and by the DECOVALEX Project. The second author was supported by a CSC scholarship (No. 202008390058). The CODE_BRIGHT project is funded by a Consortium composed by SKB (Sweden), Posiva (Finland), GRS (Germany) and ANDRA (France). DECOVALEX is an international research project comprising participants from industry, government and academia, focusing on development of understanding, models and codes in complex coupled problems in sub-surface geological and engineering applications; DECOVALEX-2023 is the current phase of the project. The authors appreciate and thank the DECOVALEX-2023 Funding Organisations ANDRA, BASE, BGE, BGR, CAS, CNSC, COVRA, US DOE, ENRESA, ENSI, JAEA, KAERI, NWMO, NWS, SÚRAO, SSM and Taipower for their financial and technical support of the work described in this paper. The statements made in the paper are, however, solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Funding Organisations. Special thanks to I.P. Damians for facilitating the original numerical model used in his work (Damians et al., 2020), in which one of the models presented in this article has been based. |
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