Modeling Uranium Transport in Rough-Walled Fractures with Stress-Dependent Non-Darcy Fluid Flow

Tong Zhang, Xiaodong Nie, Shuaibing Song, Xianjie Hao and Xin Yang
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Tong Zhang: State Key Laboratory of Mining Response and Disaster Prevention and Control in Deep Coal Mines, Anhui University of Science and Technology, Huainan 232001, China
Xiaodong Nie: School of Mechanics and Civil Engineering, China University of Mining and Technology (Beijing), Beijing 100083, China
Shuaibing Song: State Key Laboratory of Mining Response and Disaster Prevention and Control in Deep Coal Mines, Anhui University of Science and Technology, Huainan 232001, China
Xianjie Hao: Institute of Energy, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center, Hefei 230031, China
Xin Yang: State Key Laboratory of Mining Response and Disaster Prevention and Control in Deep Coal Mines, Anhui University of Science and Technology, Huainan 232001, China

Mathematics, 2022, vol. 10, issue 5, 1-21

Abstract: The reactive-transportation of radioactive elements in fractured rock mass is critical to the storage of radioactive elements. To describe the reactive-transportation and distribution morphology of a uranium-containing solution, a stress-dependent reactive transport model was developed, and the simulator of FLAC3D-CFD was employed. The uranium transport experiment subjected to the variation of confining stress of 5–19 MPa and hydraulic pressure of 0.5–3.5 MPa was conducted in fractured rock mass. The results show that the uranium-containing solution transport and distribution is significantly dependent on the evolution of the connected channel in rough-walled fracture, which is significantly influenced by the confining stress and hydraulic pressure. In more detail, the increase of confining stress resulted in the anisotropic of seepage channel in aperture, and corresponding turbulence flow and uranium retention were presented at the fracture aperture of 2–5 μm. As the increase of hydraulic pressure, flow regime evolved from the inertial flow to vortex flow, and the transformation region is 16 MPa confining stress and 1.5 MPa hydraulic pressure. The evolution of loading paths also dominates the flow and solute transport, and high seepage speed and strong solute transport were presented at the k = 1 (ratio of vertical stress loading to horizontal stress unloading), and a laminar flow and weak solute transport were presented at k = 0.

Keywords: fractured rock mass; uranium-containing solution; multifield coupling; reactive transport; rough-walled fracture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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