Variation of the Frost Boundary below Road and Railway Embankments in Permafrost Regions in Response to Solar Irradiation and Winds 

N.I. Kömle[1] and W. Feng[2]
[1]Space Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Graz, Austria
[2]State Key Laboratory of Frozen Soil Engineering, Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, Lanzhou, China
Published in 2009

We present COMSOL solutions for a coupled gas flow and heat transfer problem, which occurs particularly when traffic pathways are constructed in high altitude and arctic regions, where the underground is frozen soil. To avoid melting of the frozen ground (which usually leads to mechanical instability) one has to find suitable measures to keep the subsurface soil and the embankment suitably cool. Here we study two ways to do this: (i) protection of the embankment by awning constructions against unwanted heating by solar irradiation and (ii) cooling or heating by lateral gas flows, e.g. natural winds. We calculate the flow field and its influence on the temperature field in the embankment and the subsurface soil for laminar flows, using the appropriate COMSOL application modes.

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