EXTENDED POROSITY RATE FUNCTION FOR FROST HEAVE Basel Abdalla

• Main Authors: Wood Group Kenny, Chengye Fan, Colin Mckinnon
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Arctic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.658.1745; http://proceedings.asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/pdfaccess.ashx?PDFSource%3D13%26ResourceID%3D7623135

Frost heave is a common phenomenon in the Arctic, where soil expands in the direction of heat loss due to ice lens growth upon freezing. It also occurs if a refrigerated structure is buried in unfrozen frost heave-susceptible soil, and thus special considerations are required when designing chilled or LNG pipelines in the Arctic. In the past decades, many theoretical and numerical methods have been developed to predict the frost heave of freezing soil. Among them, the rigid ice model, segregation potential model, and porosity rate function model are the most popular. These frost heave models work well in predicting the soil response during a pure freezing process, but none of these methods consider a thawing and consolidation of soil, which is the opposite but integrated process when the system undergoes the annual temperature cycle. In this study, efforts are made to extend the porosity rate function to the thawing branch based on reasonable assumptions. With the extended model, a fluctuating surface temperature can be applied on top of the soil surface to simulate a continuous changing ambient temperature. The extended model is realized in ABAQUS with user defined subroutines. It is also validated with test data available in the public domain. As an application example, the extended model is utilized to simulate a chilled gas line buried in frost-susceptible soil to estimate its frost heave over a multi-year operation. 1