The Account of Frost Heave and Thawing Processes When Designing Road Embankments in Cold Regions

Abstract

Construction of railway embankments in cold regions is associated with a need to take into account not only changes in temperature but also deformations of embankments and their subsoils during freezing and thawing. If in case of aboveground structures (elements of buildings and transport facilities) temperature changes are accompanied, as a rule, by relatively small linear deformations, for soils—deformations of frost heave and thawing, associated with freezing and thawing due to phase transformations of water, significantly exceed temperature deformations in elements of a structure. Therefore, calculation of deformations of embankments and their subsoils increases complexity of designing these sites by an order. The method developed by the authors for the finite-element solution of such problems consists of two stages: calculation of temperature fields and calculation of the stress–strain behavior of soil and structures located on it. The article pays attention to inevitable heterogeneity of temperature fields for linear structures located in the cryolithozone, oriented in the latitudinal direction, which causes uneven deformations of frost heave and thawing.