Measurement of Air Tightness of Concrete Block and its Construction Joint from a Model Experiment

Abstract Underground compressed air energy storage (CAES) system in a lined rock cavern is considered one of the promising large-scale energy storage technologies. In this study, permeabilities of concrete lining block and its construction joint, which are the major components of an air tightness system of the undeground CAES, were measured from a model experiment. From the experiment, it was found that intrinsic permeability of construction joint was larger than that of concrete block by the order scale of 10 1 ～10 4 , so that it would be very important to control the quality of construction joints in-situ in order to secure air tightness of storage system. And the permeability of construction joint could be decreased as low as that of the concrete block by pasting an acryl-type adhesive on bonding surfaces. Higher degrees of water saturation of the concrete block resulted in the lower permeability, which is more preferable in the viewpoint of air tightness of storage cavern. Key words