New Insights Into Freezing Behavior of Saturated and Air‐Entrained Porous Media via a Micromechanics‐Based Thermo‐Hydro‐Mechanical Model

Abstract

The freezing behavior of porous media, such as soils, rock, and cement-based materials, to name but a few, seriously endanger the safety of infrastructures in cold regions (Huang et al., 2022;Peng et al., 2016;Sheshukov & Nieber, 2011). Even though the famous air-entrainment method is normally used to reduce the severe swelling of porous media during freezing, frost damage is still a frequent occurrence (Beaudoin & MacInnis, 1974;Everett, 1961;Fagerlund, 1977). Actually, the freezing behavior of porous media is generated under a coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical (THM) condition at a low temperature and involves several complex aspects, such as microstructure characteristics and environmental factors. Specifically, part of the liquid water in confined pores gradually freezes and yields an important pore pressure during freezing, which not only induces the macroscopic deformation and microscopic porosity variation (i.e., mechanics field) but also changes the heat transfer (i.e., thermal field) and seepage (i.e., hydraulic pressure field) in porous media (Eriksson et al., 2018(Eriksson et al., , 2021. During the progressive freezing process of porous media, THM fields are fully coupled and provide three driving forces for freezing deformation (Coussy, 2005), namely, thermal stress, pore pressure, and stress induced by displacement or loading boundaries. The pore pressure can also be treated as the prestress (Yang et al., 2015). Moreover, the deformation and heat transfer abilities of porous media rely on the effective material properties, which in turn depend on the microstructure characteristics (

Study on the Supercooling Characteristics of Freezing Soil Based On Nucleation Theory

“…After more than a century of development in the field of atmospheric science, materials science and other disciplines, there is a complete system and applied research on nucleation theory (Barahona, 2014;Ickes et al, 2015;Pruppacher & Klett, 2000;Volmer & Weber, 1926;Zobrist et al, 2007). As one of the popular ways for studying phase transition, nucleation theory gradually attracted the attention of many scholars in the field of agriculture and engineering in the second half of the last century, and was gradually introduced to the study of permafrost and saline soils (Einav & Liu, 2023;Guo et al, 2023). In the past studies on phase transition crystallization and supercooling characteristics of earth-water systems, the homogeneous nucleation theory is widely adopted.…”