A new seasonal frozen soil water-thermal coupled migration model and its numerical simulation

• Published in: PLOS ONE
• Main Authors: Zhang, Chaoyi, Chen, Feng, Sun, Lei, Ma, Zhangchao, Yao, Yan
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Public Library of Science 2021
• Subjects: Research Article; permafrost
• Online Access: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8608487/; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34808660; https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258861

In this paper, a mathematical model based on spherical differential unit cell is proposed as a model for studying seasonal freeze-thaw soil space infinitesimal differential unit cell. From this model, the basic equations of permafrost moisture and heat flow motion are directly derived, then the linked equations form the permafrost water-heat coupled transport model. On this basis, the one-dimensional seasonal permafrost water-heat transport equation is derived. The model reduces the original spatial three-variable coordinate system (parallel hexahedron) into a coupled equation with a single spherical radius (R) as the independent variable, so the iterations of the numerical simulation algorithm is greatly reduced and the complexity is decreased. Finally, the model is used to simulate the seasonal freeze-thaw soil in the ShiHeZi region of Xinjiang, China. The principle of the simulation is to collect the soil temperature and humidity values of the region in layers and fixed-points using a homemade freeze-thaw soil sensor, after that we solve it by numerical calculation using MATLAB. The analysis results show that the maximum relative error of the model we proposed is 4.36, the minimum error is 0.98, and the average error is 2.515. The numerical simulation results are basically consistent with the measured data, then the proposed model is consistent with the matching states of permafrost moisture content and soil temperature in the region at different times. In addition, the experiments also demonstrate the reliability and accuracy of the model.