A Constitutive Law of Salt Concrete Used for Closure of an LILW-Repository Available to Purchase

The Repository of LILW Radioactive Waste Morsleben (ERAM) is located in the Federal State Saxony Anhalt, Germany. After an operational phase of about 20 years it is now under licensing for closure. As the repository was erected in a former salt mine, there exists a void volume of approx. 6 million m³. Consequently, a closure concept was developed serving three main functional requirements: stabilization, limitation of leaching processes and sealing. It relies on a comprehensive backfilling of the openings using two mixtures of salt concretes. The concretes will be used to backfill cavities as well as to construct seals. As the salt concretes are used in the sense of a mass concrete the heat of hydration induces thermal restraint stresses inside the concrete bodies and the neighboring rocks. To show the integrity of the geological and technical barriers thermo-mechanical computations were carried out. In the numerical code which is used for safety analyses a so-called hydration model was implemented describing the evolution of strength and Young’s modulus of the concretes in relation to the degree of hydration. The hydration model includes a transformation of the temperature-dependent setting process from real time into an equivalent age, which is equal to the setting time at a temperature of 293 K. Thereafter, a coupling of the equivalent age to the degree of hydration leads to a temperature-independent description of the setting process. As the hydration of concretes strongly correlates with the amount of the generated hydration heat, the model parameters were derived from laboratory tests including measurements of the adiabatic temperature rise.