Thermal conductivities of frozen and unfrozen soils at three project sites in northern Manitoba

Abstract

If acceptable performance is to be obtained from new highway embankments in cold regions, thermal modeling during initial design needs to simulate the effects of climate warming and changes in air-to-ground heat transfer on future ground temperatures, thawing, and resulting deformations.The authors' research involved geothermal modeling of current and future seasonal ground temperatures under highway embankments and transmission line towers on degrading permafrost in northern Manitoba, Canada. This paper describes a part of the larger study that used a thermal needle to measure thermal conductivities of samples taken from three sites. Analyses that used these measured thermal conductivities produced better modeling of seasonal temperatures than analyses that used empirical values from the research literature.