MULTIPHYSICAL SIMULATIONS OF THE FREEZING EFFECTS ON SOILS

Summary

This article describes the development and implementation of a coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical model to study the soil–structure interactions under frost effects. The model incorporates unsaturated soil mechanics and governing principles to establish the thermo-hydraulic coupling schema. Simulations were conducted on soil–structure interactions under freezing. A case study is presented to compare the simulation results with testing data obtained from a road section of the Strategic Highway Research Program. The boundary and initial conditions were set from field instrumentation data. The predicted subsurface environmental field was compared against the actual measured data. The results of simulation match very well with the field measured data, including both the subsurface temperature and water content distribution. This article demonstrates the power of simulation model to investigate the complex interactions between soil and infrastructure under the freezing effects.