Frost heaving of foundation pit for seasonal permafrost areas

Abstract

Frost heaving can cause support structures to crack and even instability of the foundation pit. This paper describes the frost heaving features of the steel pile pre-stressed tendon composite foundation pit support system (SPPTCFPSS). As a combined rigid–flexible support system during the overwintering stage in Northeast China, these systems were used to investigate the transient heat conduction and fixed boundary one-dimensional frost heaving stress equations. The axial force sensors of the tendons used for the in-situ test accurately recorded the changing values of the axial forces of the pre-stressed tendons during the integrated working period for the foundation pit frost-heaving effect. Practical support data for the frost heaving stress analysis of the system were thus provided. The thermo-physical properties were obtained from the soil experiments, including the coefficient of thermal conductivity, specific heat of the foundation soil, and thermal expansion factor, among others. Base on this, the fluid effective velocity, saturation, and temperature fields were received from the heat flow coupling analysis of finite element methods (FEM).The results show that the actual axial force applied to the SPPTCFPSS is approximately equal to the theoretical value of the pit frost-heaving force calculated for the one-dimensional fixed boundary conditions corrected by saturation index from FEM. The SPPTCFPSS can adapt to a large-scale frost-heaving deformation to enable a reasonable increase in adaptive capacity in a region that has seasonal periods of frozen soil.