Numerical implementation of gas transfer in a thermo-hydro-mechanical

model. Application to a nuclear waste disposal

C. Chavant & S. Granet

EDF R&D, Clamart, France

Y. Akou
CS, Clamart, France

J. Talandier
ANDRA, Chatenay-Malabry, France

ABSTRACT: Radioactive waste management is an important environmental issue today. One of the possible
solutions is the deep geological underground disposal. To describe the coupling and the transfer phenomena
in these geological repositories, thermo-hydro-mechanical models are developed. In this paper we focus on a
numerical model used to describe the gas dissolved in water inside of a porous media. We first describe the
unsaturated thermo-hydro-mechanical model that we have implemented in EDFs Code_Aster FE program.
This model takes into account two phases (liquid and gas) for each two components (hydrogen and water). The
model we use is fully described, especially the diffusive laws in gas and liquid mixture. The couplings with
mechanic and thermic are also emphasized. In the second part of this paper, in order to show the importance of
a sensitive analysis on predominant phenomena and associated parameters, we present a study of a radioactive
waste disposal performed for Andra.

1 INTRODUCTION AND CONTEXT propose an analytical solution in order to validate the

A great deal of attention is focused on radioactive
waste management in nuclear industry and especially
in the feasibility of deep geological underground
disposal. In this deep repositories, important issues
to be considered are the production of gas. Indeed,
the hydrogen emitted by the steel containers corrosion
may produce gas pressure accumulation (Lassabatre
et al. 2004). This gas production can delay the resat-
uration of the geological medium and locally modify
the migration pathway for radionuclide. Thats why
a precise modeling of gas transport and diffusion is
necessary. The unsaturated thermo-hydro-mechanical
model we use takes into account two phases (liquid and
gas) for each two components (hydrogen and water):
dry hydrogen and water vapor for the gas; liquid water
and dissolved hydrogen for the liquid. The diffusion of
the gas into the liquid mixture inside the porous media
is taken into account and enlightened. Indeed, several
expressions are usually used for writing Ficks diffu-
sive law in the liquid mix: The present one links the
relative velocity of the dissolved gas in the water to
its density and is fully described. This model has been
implemented in EDFs Code_Aster FE program. We
implementation of this model for dissolved gas. In the
second part of this paper we propose an application
with a study of a cross section of a nuclear waste dis-
posal performed for Andra (Talandier 2003). Through
this, we show the importance of the corrosion veloc-
ity depending on the saturation. Finally, characteristic
time calculation is used to outline the predominant
phenomena for these kind of studies. By this way
we see, depending the media and condition of sat-
uration, which of diffusion, dissolution or Darcy is
predominant.
One of the main difficulties of this kind of study
is the numerical treatment of stiff fronts. Those are
involved by the high level of heterogeneities of the
different materials and the strong non linearities due
to the permeability and capillarity curves.
2 MODELLING OF AN UNSATURATED
POROUS MEDIA
To model the Thermo-hydraulic-mechanical behav-
ior of porous media a fully coupled problem has to
be solved. In order to illustrate this point, a brief

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Copyright 2005 Taylor & Francis Group plc, London, UK
presentation of the constitutive equations is made
bellow (Chavant et al. 2004). In the following, the
subscript w, vp, as and ad are given for the liquid
water, vapour, dry and dissolved gas. We note Slq the
degree of saturation of liquid. The liquid pressure plq
and the gas pressure pgz are related through the capil-
lary pressure pc which is an experimentally determined
function of Slq :
Furthermore, we have:
2.1 Conservation equations
We note c the density of the component c,
c = (w, vp, as, ad), Mc its mass flow and the porosity.
The mass conservation is given by:
The momentum balance equation for the mechani-
cal aspects is given by
with r the averaged density of the medium and Fm the
mass forces.
The energy conservation equation for the thermal
aspect is given by
with mc the mass content of c, hm c its mass enthalpy, 
the internal heat source and Q
the non convicted heat.
2.2 Mass transfer
The Darcys laws are applied to each phase p,
p = (lq, gz) such as
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Copyright 2005 Taylor & Francis Group plc, London, UK
with K int the intrinsic permeability, kprel the relative
permeability of the phase p, and p its viscosity.
Ficks diffusive law links the velocity of each com-
ponent of one phase and depends of a concentration Cc
(Bear 1990). Noting Fp a Ficks diffusion coefficient,
we have the general expression:
There are different ways to express the concen-
tration. We choose the molar concentration of the
component c in the phase p (mole/m3 ) (Mainguy
2000). Noting cc this concentration and Mcol the molar
mass of the component:
and
For the gas, the molar concentration is equivalent to
the pressure concentration because of the perfect gas
equation and we can also write
Then we can define a Ficks coefficient Dp (m2 /s) who
links the diffusive molar flow of a component related
p
to its phase Jc (mol/ m2 /s) to the molar concentration
(Nastev 2001, Moldrup 2001) such as :
p
with Mc the mass flow of the component c relative to
its phase p such as:
We link the phase velocities to the component
velocities:
We can assume that Cad << 1. Finally, we obtain the Table 1. Datas values and notations.
following relations:
Physical data Notation Value
for the liquid mixture,
Initial water density (kg/m3 ) 0w 103
Solid density (kg/m3 ) s 2930
ol
Vapor molar mass (kg/mole) Mvp 0.018
Water mass heat (J/K) CwP 4180
P
Vapor mass heat (J/K) Cvp 1900
P
and for the gas mixture, Dry gas mass heat (J/K) Cas 1900
P
Dissolved gas mass heat (J/K) Cad 1900
Henry coefficient (Pa.m3 /mol) KH 50000
Initial porosity 0 0.3
Initial gas pressure (Pa) p0gz 105
Initial vapor pressure (Pa) p0vp 3700
we note that Flq = Dlq .Cad . Initial liquid saturation Slq0 0.5
Derived saturation S 1012
Ideal gas constant R 8.32
External heat Q
4.105
2.3 Equilibrium equation
The dissolved gas is in equilibrium with its gaseous
phase according to the Henrys Law: The mass content input of each component could then
be written:

with Kh (Pa.m3 /mol) the Henrys coefficient.

Equilibrium between water and vapor is given by
the relation between the free enthalpies (Coussy 2004)
gcm , c = (w, vp):

There is no fluid flow on the boundary: the mass of

water and gas are conserved.
Combining with enthalpys definition, it involves:

which involve:

2.4 An analytical solution for the heating

of a unsaturated porous media with
dissolved gas
We propose in this part an analytical solution in order
to validate our model on a simplified problem (no Combining (1), (2) and (16), we obtain
mechanic and no diffusion).
We assume a problem without space dependency
(0D). A constant thermal flow is applied on the bound-
ary. Water density and porosity are constant such
as w = w0 and = 0 . Notations and values are in
Table 1, the initial values are noted with the exponent 0 . that could be derived:
We assume that the capillary pressure is linear
such as:

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Copyright 2005 Taylor & Francis Group plc, London, UK
The integration of (18) combining (24) gives:
After coupling (22), (25), (16) and the perfect gas
equation, we obtain a system which we linearise.
Finally, we obtain the system formed by Equations
(26), (27), (28):
with the assumption that Mas ol
= Mvp
ol
. and the water consumption flow FH2O is:
In order to complete this system, we write the ther-
mal equation. It is known that the external heat Q
could be written as following:
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Copyright 2005 Taylor & Francis Group plc, London, UK
Table 2. Results comparisons.
pvp pw pas T
Analytic results 29.4 99500 45.7 0.144
Code_Aster results 29.5 99430 44.0 0.144
with C0 the specific heat obtained at constant defor-
mation such as:
and the assumption that the thermal dilatation of water
and solid are none. This external heat is equal to the
input of eat for a volume unit.
We just have to solve the linear system produced
by (26), (27), (28) and (30) using the values in the
Table 1.
Table 2 gives the analytic results and those obtained
with Code_Aster. The weak differences are due to the
linearization and approximation we have done.
3 APPLICATION TO A RADIOACTIVE
WASTE DISPOSAL
3.1 Hypothesis
In order to study the consequences of the hydrogen
emitted by the steel containers, we present an axi-
symetrical modeling of a cross section. We modelize
multiple barriers: geological barrier (Cox), engineered
barrier (BO), fractured area (ZF) and damaged area
(ZE). There are gaps between BO and the container,
and between BO and ZF. Dimensions are given in Fig-
ure 2. The waste container is modeling by a thermal
flow th at the left of the section and its corrosion by
a production of water and hydrogen. The corrosion is
written by:
Then, the hydrogen production flow FH2 depending on
the corrosion velocity Vcorr is:
FH2 and FH2 O are applied on the left of gap 1 for the
corrosion of the container and between BO and gap 2
for corrosion of steel casing.
 Vcorr(Slq) Vcorr(Slq) The initial conditions are Pc = 23.6 Mpa (S = 0.7) in
BO and Pc = 0.5 Mpa (S = 0.95) in ZF, ZE and COX.
In the gap the initial saturation is 0.1. In all the cross
Vcorrmax Vcorrmax
section the initial gas pressure is 0.1 Mpa and the initial
temperature is 30 C.
20%.Vcorrmax
Slq Slq
0.2 0.8 0.8 3.2 Numerical aspects

Figure 1. Corrosion velocities curves.

This computation has been made with EDFs finite ele-
ment code: Code_Aster. The mesh is composed of 684
elements of 8 nodes each. To avoid numerical locking
gap 1 gap 2 problem (Ouyang 1994) we use P1 elements for pres-
Cox
sure and temperature and P2 for the displacements. To
BO ZF ZE
prevent oscillations, we also use a classical method of
mass matrix lumping. A practical way to produce this
80 cm 16 cm 1.07 m 198 m
result for a fully coupled problem is to take the inte-
Figure 2. Geometry of the cross section.
gration points located on the vertex of the elements.
This approach provides under-integrated elements for
the mechanic.
Table 3. Van-Genuchten parameters.

BO ZF ZE COX 3.3 Characteristic time calculation

Pr (Pa) 1.77.10 7
1.96.10 6
4.91.10 6 7
1.47.10 In order to evaluate the predominant phenomena, an
n 1.61 1.5 1.5 1.49 approximate characteristic time is calculate for each
m 0.379 0.333 0.333 0.329 phenomena.
Swres 0.010 0.00 0.00 0.010 Combination of Equations (6),(13),(14) and (15)
gives:

Three corrosion velocities curve are used: Vcorr (Slq ),

Vcorr (Slq ) and Vcorr max; with Vcorr max = 1m/an and:
The saturations are given by a Van-Genuchten
curve:

and

with n, m, Pr and Swres material parameters given in Using (38) and (39) we write the mass of gas con-
Table 3.The relative permeabilities we use are given servation (3). Regarding separately each phenomena,
by the following relations: and considering the simplification involved by it, this
equation could have the following form:

and Considering only Darcys flow and nor diffusion

nor dissolution, mass of gas conservation could be
simplified and linearized such as:

with

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Copyright 2005 Taylor & Francis Group plc, London, UK
Table 4. Characteristic times. 1,20
Cox
Phenomena Slq tc BO
1,00

Saturation
Vapor diffusion 0.8 0.6 days 0,80
Darcy with krel2 0.8 30 years 5 years
Dissolution 0.8 1600 years 0,60 10 years
ZE 100 years
Darcy 0.8 3.106 years
0,40 3000 years
Dissolution 1 30 years
5000 years
Darcy with krel2 1 0,20 ZF
Darcy 1
Vapor diffusion 1 0,00
1,00 2,00 3,00 4,00 5,00 6,00
X (m)

Considering only vapor diffusion and nor Darcys Figure 3. Saturation profiles along x.
flow nor dissolution, mass of gas conservation could
be simplified and linearized such as:
8,00E+06
7,00E+06

Gas pressure (Pa)

V''corr(S) 1000 years
6,00E+06 Vcorr(S) 1000 years
5,00E+06
ZF
4,00E+06
BO ZE
3,00E+06
2,00E+06
1,00E+06
Considering only dissolution and nor Darcys flow 0,00E+00
nor vapor diffusion, mass of gas conservation could be 0,00 2,00 4,00 6,00 8,00
simplified and linearized such as: X (m)

Figure 4. Comparison of saturation profiles.

Table 5. Maximum pressure at 1000 years.

Corrosion velocity Vcorr(S) Vcorrmax V corr(S)

Pgz (Mpa) 7.8 19 6.4

The characteristic time tc for Equation (40), for a

length h is given by:
The results obtained for a given saturation and a length
h = 0.5 m are in the Table 4. In order to appreciate the
importance of the relative gas permeability choice, we
make the calculation for another one:
corr, corrosion is very
By this, we deduce that gas dissolution and its diffu-
sion are predominant for a saturated porous media. For
a partially unsaturated porous media; diffusion in gas
mixture is predominant considering the first relative
gas permeability. On the contrary for the second per-
meability, the predominant phenomena are Darcy or
vapor diffusion regarding to the saturation.
3.4 Results
Figure 3 presents profiles of saturation in the cross sec-
tion at several times. In this case, the corrosion velocity
Vcorr(Slq ) is depending of saturation and has a plateau
when S = 0.2 (Figure 1).
We observe that the engineered barrier is first satu-
rating by the fractured area which is very permeable.
By this way, corrosion is strongly stimulated and a lot
of hydrogen is produced: thats why the profile at 10
years is sloped. The high level of gas production makes
that after 100 years the saturation in the BO decreases
again.Those results are highly depending on the choice
of corrosion velocity. With V
small when saturation is close from zero: production
of gas decreases (and by the way gas pressure and
stress). We could observe it on Figure 4 which is a
comparison of gas pressure according to the choice of
corrosion velocity. Table 5 gives the maximum of gas
pressure depending on the three velocities we test. The
influence is very high. We also pointed out the part of

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Copyright 2005 Taylor & Francis Group plc, London, UK
kinematic. Indeed, the more an area is corroded slowly,
the more the gas pressure for this same corroded zone
is small.
3.5 Conclusion
In this paper, we give different aspects of numerical
modeling of gas transfer in porous media. Model of
gas and liquid transport has been detailed. We have
proposed an analytical solution to validate a simpli-
fied model. A practical application on a radioactive
waste disposal has been showed. The numerical diffi-
culties of stiff front treatment have been here solved.
This study has showed the importance of the choice
of parameters especially corrosion velocity. Through
a characteristic time calculation, we have also demon-
strate the importance of relative permeability of gas.
This choice is fully decisive.
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