At the beginning of this thesis, the underground high-pressure storage facilities for the media air and hydrogen are explained. This includes an explanation of common underground storage types and methods as well as a list of current projects in operation for civil use or for research purposes.
As part of a research project dealing with the storage of excessive energy in the supply network of the future, an underground hydrogen storage facility is to be built at the Zentrum am Berg (ZaB) research facility of the Montanuniversität Leoben on the Styrian Erzberg. The numerical simulation of this hydrogen storage facility is part of a series of master's and bachelor's theses dealing with the storage of energy under high pressure in underground storage facilities.
The construction of the hydrogen storage should be based on the ‘lined rock cavern - LRC’ principle, which is described in the theoretical part of this thesis. The components of the cavern lining, possible failure mechanisms and a test facility in Sweden are described in more detail. Based on many years of experience in the construction of pressure tunnels for hydropower plants, a large number of lining options for pressure tunnels and their analytical calculation have been developed. A pre-stressed concrete lining or steel lining are used at locations of the pressure tunnel where higher operating pressures occur and are being considered as possible lining variants for the hydrogen storage facility. Experience and execution methods from pressure tunnel construction for steel linings and the pre-stressing process of a concrete inner lining complete the theoretical part of this thesis.
The analytical method from Seeber is used to dimension the lining of pressurised tunnels. A previous master's thesis as part of the research series on underground hydrogen storage dealt with the calculation of the lining of the high-pressure storage facility according to Seeber. Based on the results of the Seeber calculation method, a numerical simulation of the pre-stressed concrete lining and the steel lining is carried out in this thesis.
For the pre-stressed concrete lining, a method for the generation of a numerical model is developed that uses an input parameter that has been previously calibrated to Seeber's results. In combination with numerical models to simulate the gap injection process and to investigate the influence of the in-situ stress state in the rock mass, Seeber's analytical method and the numerical simulation can now be used in combination for the design of a pre-stressed concrete lining.
The minimum steel thickness resulting from Seeber's calculation to withstand the storage internal pressure is analysed by a numerical simulation with regard to the maximum steel elongation and the utilisation of the steel strength. Various influences such as the in-situ stress state and a possible failure of the surrounding rock mass are taken into account.