The Problem

Artificial ground freezing can be an effective way to deal with various construction ground control challenges such as the mitigation of seepage infiltration into tunnels and shaft excavations; or ground strengthening for excavation. First used over 100 years ago, it is common practice in several areas of geotechnical engineering. In many cases, the presence of moving water adds more heat than can be removed by the chilled pipe network. When this happens, closure of the barrier wall will not happen.

The Solution

GeoStudio can consider ground freezing and thawing with phase change due to conduction or both conduction and convection of heat in moving water and or moving air. There are a variety of boundary condition options that allow for steady state or transient analyses. A “convective surface” boundary condition is specially implemented to allow for artificial ground freezing where a flowing fluid in a close piping system removes heat from the ground. The same boundary condition could be applied in reverse to simulate forced heating of the ground in special circumstances. Using Add-In constitutive models in SIGMA/W and SLOPE/W will allow for the results from a thermal analysis to be used to assess deformations or stability due to changing ground strengths that are temperature dependent.