The Experimental Study of the Soil Thermal Conductivity Based on the Analysis of Actual Internal Fabric

Abstract

Thermal properties are very important physical indices of soils which could be applied to estimate the thermal capacity of environmental control system of underground infrastructures. At present, the existing ideal prediction models of thermal conductivity were not suitable for soil which in fact had very complicated internal fabric. For this purpose, SEM images of soil specimens were taken and digitized with binarizing process by using self-developed software package – ImgAnsys for image analysis, and the treated images were successfully input into ANSYS and analyzed based on the two-dimensional heat transient transferring model. It was found that the simulating results were closely consistent with experimental results, which could illustrate the feasibility of this new experimental method.