Fundamental Theroy and Experimental Research

Experimental study of water migration in saturated freezing silty soil

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  • State Key Laboratory of Geomechanics and Geotechnical Engineering, Institute of Rock and Soil Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, Hubei 430071, China

Received date: 2014-09-16

  Online published: 2018-06-09

Supported by

This research was supported by the National Program on Key Basic Research Project of China (973 Program) (2012CB026102), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41572295, 51239010) and the Youth Innovation Promotion Association of CAS (2015272).

Abstract

Freezing tests are conducted on saturated silty soil samples with different boundary temperatures and heights to study water migration, water redistribution, frost heave and ice lens. The experimental results shows that, when temperature becomes steady, water keeps on migrating to freezing front and water content increases sharply near the freezing front and ice lens forms. The geometry of ice lenses in saturated freezing silty soil is regular without dendritic structure and frozen soil has massive structure without network of cracks. There is a starting time for frost heave, before which the water in soil is drained by the sudden freezing of the supper-cooled soil water. When the frost heave occurs water from outside supplies to the soil sample and the frost heave amount due to water inlet approximates to the total frost heave. The height of soil sample influences water migration and frost heaving amount. A higher soil sample has smaller frost heaving amount and less water content while water increment distributes more diffuse and the starting time for frost heave is longer.

Cite this article

WEI Hou-zhen, ZHOU Jia-zuo, WEI Chang-fu, CHEN Pan . Experimental study of water migration in saturated freezing silty soil[J]. Rock and Soil Mechanics, 2016 , 37(9) : 2547 -2552 . DOI: 10.16285/j.rsm.2016.09.015

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