Introduction to the Special Issue of Geotechnical and Geological Engineering Entitled: “Thermo-Hydro-Mechanical Behavior of Soils and Energy Geostructures”

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This special issue of Geotechnical and Geological Engineering highlights state-of-the-art research on the thermo-hydro-mechanical behavior of soils, rocks and energy geostructures. Although the impetus of the special issue was to collect journal papers on subjects related to an NSF-funded international workshop on ‘‘Thermally Active Geotechnical Systems for Near Surface Geothermal Energy’’ held in March 2013 at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland, the special issue expanded to collect a broader set of papers from the field of Energy Geotechnics that involve thermal soil behavior. A total of 15 journal papers were selected to be published as part of the special issue, and went through the standard peer review process for the journal. Two papers focused on the thermal properties of unsaturated soils. Likos (2014) presented a pore-scale model for predicting the thermal conductivity of unsaturated sands using basic soil properties. Dong et al. (2014) presented an evaluation of various approaches to predict the thermal conductivity of unsaturated soils, and compared them with experimental data for sand, silt and clay. One paper was presented on the thermal volume change of unsaturated soils, and the impact of these volume changes on the response of a heated shallow foundation (Houston et al. 2014). Three papers were published on different aspects of geothermal heat exchangers in conventional applications (boreholes and horizontal trenches). Wu et al. (2014) studied relationships between the thermal conductivity dryout curve for unsaturated soils and the performance of geothermal heat exchangers in horizontal trenches, Ozudogru et al. (2014a) compared the performance of different numerical simulations to evaluate the response of geothermal heat exchangers in vertical boreholes, and Walker et al. (2014) studied the impact of different stratigraphic units on the overall thermal response of a geothermal heat exchanger in a vertical borehole. Seven papers were focused on the thermal and thermo-mechanical response of energy piles. Loveridge et al. (2014) analyzed the response of different types of auger cast piles that were converted into energy piles. Yu et al. (2015) used numerical modeling to evaluate the thermal conductivity of different soil layers from the analysis of a thermal response test on an energy pile. Kramer et al. (2014) evaluated the thermal response of an energy pile in sand constructed within a laboratory container. Murphy and McCartney (2014) studied the J. S. McCartney (&) Department of Structural Engineering, University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr, La Jolla, CA 92093-0085, USA e-mail: mccartney@ucsd.edu