Abstract:
Study of the hydraulic conductivity in the freezing soils and the
frost heave mechanism started as far as in the 30’s of the last century and even
earlier. However explanation of frost heave mechanism with hydraulic conductivity
is fundamentally wrong approach which leads to the complication in the
calculations and the predictions of frost heave. The presented work explains the
detailed description of the moisture migration in a gas phase within the freezing
porous media and gives the mathematical modelling based on the phase transitions
of moister as water–gas–water-ice. The proposed method is based on the
thermodynamically and phases equilibrium and allows to determine the speed of
the mass transfer in the freezing media. The calculations were shown in an example
of the experimental testing data. The obtained results admit the strong relationship
of the frost heave and air void volume. They also emphasize the impact of soil
density, void ratio and moisture content on the amount of built ice in the freezing
zone of the soil.
