Keynote Session
The wonder of Numerical Modeling
- Dr. Christine Detournay
- ITASCA
Biography
Christine Detournay started working as a full-time consultant for Itasca in 1993, where she is now a Principal Engineer. She holds a Geoengineering degree from the University of Liege, Belgium and a MSc and PhD degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of Minnesota. Her expertise is in the development of numerical models for application to coupled fluid-thermo-mechanical problems. She has contributed in the development of several Itasca codes, including FLAC, FLAC3D, 3DEC, and XSite. She is a principal developer for the groundwater-flow and thermal logic in FLAC3D and has been involved in the implementation of several of the constitutive models available with Itasca continuum codes. She has worked in consulting and development for various projects related to the oil and gas industry, including hydraulic fracturing, as well as on projects pertaining to underground waste repository, geothermal applications, slope stability, soil liquefaction and CO2 sequestration. She has co-authored more than 65 publications, including conference papers, journal papers, and book chapters.
She is the presenter of the 35th ISRM online lecture entitled “Findings from Numerical Modeling at the site of a High Dam on the Jinsha River” and the recipient of the ISRM John Hudson Rock Engineering award 2022 for “Contributing to solving important practical rock engineering problems.”
Introduction of the Lecture
Numerical simulations to predict and investigate mechanisms at stake in the subsurface are particularly exciting when they involve a combination of code development and consulting work. A deep sense of wonder is added when the project is located at out of the ordinary natural sites!
This talk is oriented around three such projects –
Columnar basalt, a natural rock formation created by the cooling of lava flow, is part of the foundation of the Baihetan dam, the second largest hydro-power plant in China, after the Three Gorges dam. The topic of this project is the development of a constitutive model to model the behavior of columnar basalt for application at the large scale of the Baihetan site.
Fairy circles, surface depressions devoid of vegetation, could possibly be a manifestation of gold hydrogen at depth. This hypothesis, recently advanced in the energy industry, is explored in this project. It is shown that a point source of hydrogen at depth in water-saturated strata could produce gas at the surface within a circular footprint. A mechanism of volumetric compaction associated to the presence of gas is used to model the formation of a depression. This finding supports one possible cause for the deformation observed in the field.
The Paradox valley, located in Colorado State, USA, is the site of the Bureau of Reclamation salinity control project. The paradox arises from the observation that the local Dolores River runs its course in the direction perpendicular to the valley, created by the dissolution, over millions of years, of a fold in the underlying salt dome. The PVU project collects saline groundwater from the Dolores River and reinjects it in a kilometer deep well. The project studies alternative injection well locations to mitigate induced seismicity.