Moisture Retention Curves of Topopah Spring Tuff at Elevated Temperatures

Knowledge of unsaturated flow and transport in porous media is critical for understanding the movement of water and solute through the unsaturated zone. The suction potential of rock determines the imbibition of water and, therefore, the moisture retention in the matrix. That, in turn, affects the relative importance of matrix flow and fracture flow, and their interaction, because greater suction potential moves more water from fractures into the matrix and therefore retards fracture flow. The moisture content as a function of the suction potential is called a moisture retention curve or a characteristic curve. Moisture-retention data are important input for numerical models of water movement in unsaturated porous media. Also important are the effect of sample history on the moisture-retention curves and whether there is significant hysteresis between wetting and drying measurements. The Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Project (YMP) of the U.S. Department of Energy is studying the suitability of the tuffaceous rock at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, for a potential high-level nuclear waste repository. The potential repository horizon will be in the unsaturated zone of the Topopah Spring member (densely welded) of the Paintbrush Tuff unit at Yucca Mountain. This unit is highly fractured. Therefore, transport of water within the near field of the nuclear waste package in the repository is strongly influenced by the suction potential of the repository host rocks at elevated temperatures. In a high-level nuclear waste repository, the rock mass around the waste packages will become dry because of the thermal load of the waste but will then re-wet during the cool-down period as the thermal output of the waste packages declines. Much of this process will occur at temperatures above ambient temperature. The goal of our work is to determine the importance of temperature and the wetting-drying hysteresis on the measured moisture retention curves of the densely welded tuff. For Topopah Spring tuff the suction potential is assumed to be primary due to the matric potential