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.