From April 27th to 30th, the 8th project (DECOVALEX-2023) of DECOVALEX (DEvelopment of COupled models and their VALidation against EXperiments) was held in the form of video conference. The meeting was co-chaired by Dr. Jens Birkholzer from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Dr. Alex from Quintessa Laboratory. More than 80 scholars from more than 10 countries and 30 top research institutions attended the conference.

The implementation period of DECOVALEX-2023 is from 2020 to 2023, which is divided into 7 tasks: 1) Task A: Heat and Gas Fracking; 2) Task B: Modelling Advection of Gas In Clays ; 3) Task C: Modelling THM processes at the Full-Scale Emplacement (FE) heater experiment; 4) Task D: Full-scale Engineered Barrier System Experiment at Horonobe URL; 5) Task E: Heated Brine Availability Test in Salt; 6) Task F: PA/UQ/SA Benchmarking Task; 7) Task G: Safety Implications of Fluid Flow, Shear, Thermal and Reaction Processes within Crystalline Rock Fracture Networks. Participating teams from all countries actively participate in relevant research tasks according to their own research basis and research needs.

DECOVALEX was started in 1992, the specific implementation mode of the project is that the global well-known research teams use their own models and numerical simulation programs to carry out the research on the same scientific problem, and use the results of indoor and large-scale field tests to verify the reliability of numerical simulation, so as to improve and develop their own models and simulation methods.

IRSM attaches great importance to participate in the DECOVALEX-2023, and has set up a scientific research team composed of more than 10 young researchers to participate in this program. After the kick-off meeting, it will actively carry out various works in accordance with the objectives.

video conference