Chemical controls on the propagation and healing of subcritical fractures
- Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
- Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL (United States)
- Univ. of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT (United States)
- Cornell Univ., Ithaca, NY (United States)
Human activities involving subsurface reservoirs—resource extraction, carbon and nuclear waste storage—alter thermal, mechanical, and chemical steady-state conditions in these systems. Because these systems exist at lithostatic pressures, even minor chemical changes can cause chemically assisted deformation. Therefore, understanding how chemical effects control geomechanical properties is critical to optimizing engineering activities. The grand challenge in predicting the effect of chemical processes on mechanical properties lays in the fact that these phenomena take place at molecular scales, while they manifest all the way to reservoir scales. To address this fundamental challenge, we investigated chemical effects on deformation in model and real systems spanning molecular- to centimeter scales. We used theory, experiment, molecular dynamics simulation, and statistical analysis to (1) identify the effect of simple reactions, such as hydrolysis, on molecular structures in interfacial regions of stressed geomaterials; (2) quantify chemical effects on the bulk mechanical properties, fracture and displacement for granular rocks and single crystals; (3) develop initial understanding of universal scaling for individual displacement events in layered geomaterials; and (4) develop analytic approximations for the single-chain mechanical response utilizing asymptotically correct statistical thermodynamic theory. Taken together, these findings advance the challenging field of chemo-mechanics.
- Research Organization:
- Sandia National Laboratories (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA); USDOE Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program
- DOE Contract Number:
- NA0003525
- OSTI ID:
- 2430291
- Report Number(s):
- SAND--2023-09478
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Monitoring and Repair of Cement-Geomaterial Interfaces in Borehole and Repository Scenarios
Estimation of constitutive parameters for the Belridge Diatomite, South Belridge Diatomite Field
User's Guide of TOUGH2-EGS. A Coupled Geomechanical and Reactive Geochemical Simulator for Fluid and Heat Flow in Enhanced Geothermal Systems Version 1.0
Technical Report
·
Sun Sep 01 00:00:00 EDT 2019
·
OSTI ID:1569352
Estimation of constitutive parameters for the Belridge Diatomite, South Belridge Diatomite Field
Technical Report
·
Mon Jun 01 00:00:00 EDT 1998
·
OSTI ID:656532
User's Guide of TOUGH2-EGS. A Coupled Geomechanical and Reactive Geochemical Simulator for Fluid and Heat Flow in Enhanced Geothermal Systems Version 1.0
Technical Report
·
Wed May 01 00:00:00 EDT 2013
·
OSTI ID:1136243