Innovative Concept for Analysing a Rock Salt Cavern under Cyclic Thermo-Mechanical Loading

The current paper aims to present an iterative scheme to explore the response of rock salt around energy storage caverns under thermo-mechanical cyclic loadings. Based on this, predictions from numerical simulations and measurements from laboratory investigations interact and get closer to realistic conditions. An exemplary iteration-cycle is conducted for one specific point in the vicinity of a cavern that is considered as critical in terms of the integrity-underlying rock salt behaviour, e.g. stress-strain relations and dilatancy development. The introduced scheme can be also used in those applications in which rare observations regarding the real behaviour of the system exist. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.