Sensitivity analysis of groundwater lifetime expectancy to hydro-dispersive parameters: The case of ANDRA Meuse/Haute-Marne site

G. Deman, J. Kerrou, H. Benabderrahmane and P. Perrochet

Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 2015, vol. 134, issue C, 276-286

Abstract: Within the framework of deep geological nuclear waste disposal investigations, ANDRA (French National Radioactive Waste Management Agency) has built a numerical model of groundwater flow and hydro-dispersive mass transport with the aim to analyze the characteristics of solutes transfer throughout the multilayered aquifer system including the clay host formation. As an exploratory tool, a sensitivity analysis was conducted on the average time for a water molecule flowing through the potential repository emplacement to reach the limits of the model. The correlated hydraulic conductivities and porosities of 14 hydrogeological layers are the uncertain hydro-dispersive parameters under study. A derivative-based method (Elementary Effects) is compared to regression-based global sensitivity analysis techniques (Standardized regression coefficients and Response Surface Method). As a result, the main behavior of the groundwater flow and mass transport through the multilayered system was captured. The relative effects of advective and dispersive processes are analyzed, however some uncertainties remain on the non-linear features of some input factors and their contribution to interaction processes.

Keywords: Sensitivity analysis; Mean lifetime expectancy; Radioactive waste disposal; Latin hypercube sampling; Elementary effect; Response Surface Method (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0951832014001987
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reensy:v:134:y:2015:i:c:p:276-286

DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2014.08.005

Access Statistics for this article

Reliability Engineering and System Safety is currently edited by Carlos Guedes Soares

More articles in Reliability Engineering and System Safety from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().