LARISSA

Description:

In the future, salt caverns can provide security of supply as long-term storage for "green" hydrogen, for example, or contribute regionally to grid stability on a smaller scale by providing control energy at short notice through hydrogen or compressed air. Especially for this type of provision, high engineering requirements are placed on a cavern storage facility in terms of flexibility as well as injection and withdrawal rates.

Since the decompression of the medium in a gas storage cavern leads to considerable cooling processes in the cavern and thus also directly on the cavern wall, these temperature changes in the cavern must be thermodynamically calculated and taken into account in the evaluation of the stress states in the salt rock. Numerical calculation models for cavern dimensioning should therefore also take infiltration cracking into account. Thereby it must be proven that these have a finite expansion into the rock during operation and that the stability as well as the tightness in the overall system of rock - cavern are not impaired. This proof is to be carried out at the Institute of Geotechnics Hannover (IGtH) in the test hall of the Department of Underground Construction on salt rocks of different locations.

In addition to laboratory tests, simulation calculations are being carried out that deal with crack propagation in test pieces on the one hand and focus on the influence of thermal processes on the modification of the test procedure on the other. Ultimately, a sub-goal of the "LARISSA" project is also the further development of the existing dimensioning concept for storage caverns in rock salt.