STUDY ON THE THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY OF UNSATURATED SAND CONSIDERING THE PACKING STRUCTURE OF SOIL PARTICLES

Abstract

In this study, the apparent thermal conductivity of unsaturated sand is simulated numerically modeling the sand as a periodic porous medium having immobile solid, fluid and gas phases. By varying the amount and location of the pore water, the thermal conductivity is obtained as a function of S_r (the degree of saturation) for three different sand particle packing structures. The numerical results show that the three typical relationships between the thermal conductivity and S_r, which are well known, but have been modeled poorly, can be well reconstructed by the present numerical approach.