Modeling fluid saturated porous media under frost attack

Abstract

Abstract Freezing and thawing are important processes in civil engineering. On the one hand frost damage of porous building materials like road pavements and concrete in regions with periodical freezing is well known. On the other hand, artificial freezing techniques are widely used, e.g. for tunneling in non‐cohesive soils and other underground constructions as well as for the protection of excavation and compartmentalization of contaminated tracts. Ice formation in porous media results from a coupled heat and mass transport and is accompanied by the ice expansion. The volume increase in space and time is assigned to the moving freezing front inside the porous solid. In this paper, a macroscopic ternary model is presented within the framework of the Theory of Porous Media (TPM) in view of the description of phase transition. For the mass exchange between ice and water an evolution equation based on the local balance of the heat flux vector is used. Examples illustrate the application of the model for saturated porous solids under thermal loading (© 2010 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)