The 4th workshop of DECOVALEX-THMC was held in Ottawa, Canada, Oct 2-7, 2005. More than 30 experts of different research areas had attend the meeting. Two research teams of ISRM, CAS (Institute of Rock and Soil Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences) had taken their parts with Task B and Task D in this international project.

DECOVALEX-THMC stands for Development of Coupled THM models and their Validation against Experiments. It is an international cooperative project initiated by SKI, the Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate, with participation of several international organizations. The general goal is to encourage multidisciplinary interactive and cooperative research on modeling coupled processes in fractured rocks and buffer materials, in support of the performance assessment for radioactive waste storage.

Xia-Ting Feng, professor of IRSM, CAS, was the lead researcher of the team of Task B. They were doing research on failure process simulation under compression of rocks. Peng-Zhi Pan, member of the research team had presented their research achievement on Oct 5. Prof. John Hudson, the chief of Task B had praised their works after the presentation.

Prof. Quan-Sheng Liu’s team was in Task D, while it is said that Task D was the most well organized part of the project. “There are only two teams had completed their research works and get a good result as well in current stage, we and the team from Lawrence Berkley (Research team from Earth Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory)” Prof. Liu speaks, “we will consider the chemical influence and do the real THMC coupling research in the next phase.”