Finite Element Analysis of Artificially Frozen C-Phi soil

Abstract

Artificial Ground Freezing techniques eliminate the need for structural supports during the course of an excavation, as frozen ground is solid and waterproof. At present, it is adopted as 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. In-depth knowledge of the frozen soil characteristics through experiments and the development of suitable constitutive models that suit the geological conditions of our country are necessary to predict the strength and behavior of the frozen soils. Numerical analysis of frozen soil can be used for mass works like tunneling which cannot be experimentally verified. This paper presents a validation of experimental results obtained from laboratory setup and soil freezing system for C-Phi soil. The main aim is to compare numerical and experimental results and hence obtaining the shear strength parameter of the soil, similar to the conventional triaxial test setup. To perform numerical analysis Finite element tool ANSYS 19 is used. Soil model is made in ANSYS 19 and required loads are inputted to performed the analysis similar to the experimental method. The result obtained from experimental test setup and numerical analysis was verified and compared and it was found that values of numerical results lies closer to experimental results.