6.20 Cold regions' engineering

 

Frozen Soils

Frost heave was successfully simulated at the University of Maryland (Yang and Goodings 1996). It involved a 3m high column of silt and silty clay modeled 170 days of freezing with two ground water configurations, at scales of 1:20, 1:30 and 1:45.

Figure 1 Results of model frost heave.

 

Ice characterization

An experimental program was carried out at C-CORE to better understand the effects of inertial acceleration on the physical (crystal structure, salinity, density) and mechanical properties of floating sheets of non-saline and saline ice (Barrette et al. 1998a,b).

Figure 2 Experimental package for ice testing.

 

Iceberg scour

Pipelines below iceberg-infested waters are susceptible to scour-induced damage. A series of 20 scour events were conducted at an acceleration of 150g to model this phenomenon (Hynes et al. 1995).

Figure 3 Schematic diagram of iceberg scouring

Reference

Barrette, P.D., Phillips, R., Clark, J.I. and Crocker, G., and Jones S.J. (1998a): Physical properties of columnar ice grown in a centrifuge, Proc. 7th ISOPE, Montreal, Canada, pp. 519-525.

Barrette, P.D., Phillips, R., Clark, J.I. and Crocker, G., and Jones, S.J. (1998b): Mechanical testing of floating ice sheets, Proc. of CENTRIFUGE 98, in press.

Hynes, F., Xiao, X. and Meany, R. (1995): The use of centrifuge modelling in iceberg/seabed interaction research, Geotechnical News 13, pp. 31-32.

Yang, D., and Goodings, D.J., (1996): Centrifuge modelling of frozen soil effects, Geotechnical News, 14, pp. 34-36.

This section courtesy of C-CORE