Benchmarking the thermomechanical behaviour of clays — a progress report — the CEC interclay project

In 1989 a small-scale exercise conducted by the CEC as part of its research programme into the underground storage of radioactive waste highlighted the difficulty of making accurate predictions a priori, of the geomechanical behaviour of clay. Given source data about the Boom clay from the underground research facility at Mol, three organisations independently performed f.e. analyses of two somewhat hypothetical problems. While the results were very broadly in agreement, they were shown to be sensitive to both the type of constitutive model used and the way data was fitted to the model. uently, the CEC sponsored a more comprehensive benchmark exercise called INTERCLAY II. This involves eleven organisations from various member states of the EC in a project encompassing the three aspects of software development for predictive modelling: verification, validation on the laboratory scale and the treatment of in-situ tests. The paper briefly describes the exercise currently in progress and presents the main results achieved to date concentrating on validation aspects.