Modeling and simulation of salt caverns: from lab to field scale

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• Herminio Tasinafo Honorio, Delft University of Technology
• Thursday 23 October 2025, 11:30-12:30
• Open Plan Area, Institute for Energy and Environmental Flows, Madingley Rise CB3 0EZ.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Catherine Pearson.

Underground man-made salt caverns are a proven technology for energy storage, and their usage is expected to increase in the coming years, following the current efforts towards energy transition. Upscaling salt caverns (e.g., systems of caverns) also raises concerns about safety and cavern integrity, which requires a careful lifetime assessment of their mechanical stability. In this context, this presentation examines the mechanical behavior and failure mechanisms of salt rocks, as well as methods for identifying situations that could compromise cavern integrity. The importance of a multiscale approach, spanning from laboratory experiments to field-scale simulations, is also discussed. Without diving into the mathematical details, a physical intuition is provided on how to compose a constitutive model to capture the different deformation mechanisms in salt rocks. Finally, the impact of different constitutive model choices and calibrations is analyzed in the light of numerical simulations.

This talk is part of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Flows (IEEF) series.

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