MODELING WHEEL LOADING ON FROZEN GROUND

摘要

The freezing and thawing process creates extreme strength changes in frost affected soils. These seasonal changes in strength both benefit and decrement performance of engineered structures and have a particularly severe effect on transportation systems and horizontal construction. The U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (USACRREL) has developed modeling capability of implementing the complicated constitutive behavior of thawing soil so that the impact of freeze-thaw layering on transportation systems can be simulated. These models have been used in several applications: vehicle operations on freezing/thawing ground, seasonal deterioration of unsurfaced roads, freeze-thaw effects on pavement structures, aircraft operations on frozen ground (Shoop, et al. [1]; Haehnel, et al. [2]; Parker, at al. [3]). The objective of this project was to model the impact of freeze/thaw layering on the stress and strain distribution in sand during progressively deeper frost levels. A two dimensional finite element model was used for the simulations. The elastic properties of the model were generated from in-situ strength measurements and experimental stress and strain data was used to calibrate and validate the model.