Underground food storage. The example of Rio Maggiore hypogeal warehouses in Eastern Alps, Italy

The demand of new spaces for food storage is rapidly increasing in the last few decades. At the same time, the environmental awareness and the idea of a sustainable land exploitation are also growing. Underground food storage represents a successful challenge because it allows to strongly limit the carbon dioxide emission and the land exploitation with an overall reduction of the storage costs and, at the same time, a preservation of the landscape. Moreover, the controlled atmosphere conditions assured in the hypogeal warehouses give the opportunity to keep the stored food with excellent quality for a very long time. Finally, this solution drives to a large energy saving and, consequently, to a strongly reducing of the related storing costs. This paper presents a case study where mining activities are combined with environmental remediation for food storage. After the extraction of dry dolomite material for building purposes, the excavated underground spaces are converted into hypogeal warehouses improving the mine storage capability with the application of gas proofing mineral plaster layers on all the inner cavern surfaces. The thermal behavior of the underground warehouse in the first few years of its activity is here reproduced with a Finite Element Model. Laboratory measurements of the thermal properties of the warehouses rock mass and the field records of the cooling processes supported the development of a preliminary numerical model of the heat exchange between the cavern and the rock mass. The numerical results support the developments of these underground spaces for food storage or other purposes such as groundwater reservoir and a data center hosting.