Abstract
Maximum frost depth is an important index for design of engineering in cold region to prevent frost damage. When boundary conditions and soil type are given, the frost depth is affected by soil water content. But it is still not clear how the maximum frost depth is affected by the soil water content. The heat balance during freezing and thawing processes of soils are strongly affected by soil water content as well. The knowledge about the effect of soil water content on the maximum frost depth and heat balance is very important for control and prediction of freezing and thawing processes. However, the elucidation of these effects is difficult to deal with only by physical experimental method. Therefore in this paper, the numerical experiments for some different initial water contents were performed to analyze the effects on maximum frost depth and heat balance. As the results of these experiments the maximum frost depth takes the smallest value nearing 0.15〜0.20 (m3 m-3) of total water content (ice+water) in frozen layer, and increases both with the increasing and decreasing of the total water content under the boundary conditions and soil used in this paper. The ratio of accumulate latent heat to the accumulate heat outflow to the air increases with initial water content increases, the same ratio of accumulate sensible heat increases with initial water content decreases, and the same ratio of the accumulate heat inflow from the lower boundary keeps increasing with the freezing-thawing process advance.
