Recent developments modelling THCM behaviour of geoenvironmental problems

As part of continuing research into the Thermo-Hydro-Chemo-Mechanical (THCM) processes in porous media, a number of recent developments, undertaken at the Geoenvironmental Research Centre (GRC) at Cardiff University, are presented in this paper. These processes are of particular importance in a number of geoenvironmental problems, for example, high-level nuclear waste repositories, landfill leachate transport and carbon dioxide sequestration. In particular, the numerical modeling of large field-scale phenomena has been undertaken, with a High Performance Computing (HPC) algorithm developed to take advantage of current computational facilities, hence allowing larger and more detailed models to be undertaken in realistic timescales; a geochemical model has been included into the multi-species reactive transport THCM model. In addition, a first attempt to include biological reactions has been made. These developments are placed within the context of increasing overall understanding, building predictive capacity and impact upon assessing the overall system performance