// Site Investigation and Assessment

VIRTUS

Virtual underground laboratory in rock salt

With the VIRTUS project, a powerful tool for planning and assessing repository configurations in rock salt formations is being provided to the institutions involved in repository projects in Germany. To achieve this goal, the software package offers innovative tools for simulating, visualizing, and scientifically evaluating the complex, interrelated processes in an underground laboratory or repository. Another project objective was to collect and evaluate primary literature accumulated over 30 years of repository research, leading to the development of a consolidated database for numerical simulations. A functional prototype of the software platform with the necessary functionalities for importing and exporting models and simulation results, preparing models, generating and editing mine structures, and visualization is available. The THM database structure has been developed and implemented, and literature analysis for salt rocks and EBS materials has been conducted. A virtual site with sufficient complexity for project purposes has been developed and utilized for further project work. Geometric models for three prototype experiments were created using VIRTUS and exported to programs for model calculations. The simulation results were imported and displayed by VIRTUS. The project goals of creating the virtual underground laboratory in the form of the VIRTUS software, providing the necessary thermohydraulic-mechanical parameter data, and conducting prototype simulations to demonstrate the performance of VIRTUS have thus been achieved.