Use of geostatistical modeling to capture complex geology in finite-element analyses

摘要

Thermal analyses are being used to evaluate the effects of emplacing thermally hot waste in a potential repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Thermal-property representations used in design and performance-assessment calculations for the potential repository typically are highly simplified compared with the actual geology of the site. Simplifications frequently rely on the use of uniform "representative" material properties; anisotropic geology may be captured through the use of regularly layered models, again coupled with the use of representative, or averaged, properties within layers.