Hassan Moomivand’s scientific contributions

One of most important properties of rock salt is deformability. These days, salt layers and domes are used to storing Hydrocarbons and disposing nuclear wastes. Rock mechanical stability is one of important stages in salt cavern’s design and construction, though mechanical factors (nonlinear behaviour of rock salt), thermal factors (temperature changes during injection and production) and hydraulic factors (salt permeability and viscosity of stored material) affect on short term and long term behaviour of salt cavern. Various criteria and met hods have been investigated for salt cavern’s design and stability analysis. In this paper, first, the parameters is introduced of which have influence on short term and long term behaviour of salt cavern. In second section, studies of salt cavern behaviour which have been done by authors are given. In third section, salt design’s criteria and methods, also their development process are discussed. Criteria of stability investigation, their advantages and disadvantages are discussed in last section. It is a ssigned that the stability criterion of De Vries et al (2005) is more comprehensive than others.

The uniaxial compressive strength is one of the most important mechanical properties of rocks as its assessment is necessary in various rock engineering projects. Statistically the number of larger discontinuities present in larger specimens is larger and the compressive strength is thus lower, as various research show that the uniaxial compressive strength decreases with an increase of rock specimen size. It has not been investigated whether the size affect the strength and rate of shear strain by finite difference simulation using FLAC 3D software or not. Specimens having 10 different sizes have been modeled under uniaxial compressive load using FLAC 3D software in this research. The results show that uniaxial compressive strength (UCS) and rate of shear strain decrease by power functions with an increase of specimen size. The size is also more effective on the uniaxial compressive strength and rate of shear strain for specimen having smaller size, as size effect is negligible for larger specimens having diameter of about 6 m and onward.