Geophysics

2103 Submissions

[2] viXra:2103.0151 [pdf] replaced on 2021-03-27 20:03:20

Effect of Particle Trapping on Frost Heaving Soils

Authors: Stephen Peppin
Comments: 17 Pages.

A model of freezing soils is developed that accounts for the dependence of the frost heave rate on particle trapping. At sufficiently low cooling rates the soil experiences primary frost heave with a single growing ice lens that rejects all soil particles. At higher cooling rates ice lenses start to engulf the largest soil particles and the rate of segregation heave is reduced. At the highest freezing rates all particles are engulfed by the ice and the pore water freezes in situ. A new kinetic expression for the segregation potential of the soil is obtained that accounts for particle trapping. Using this expression a simple transient frost heave model is developed and compared with experimental data.
Category: Geophysics

[1] viXra:2103.0037 [pdf] submitted on 2021-03-06 20:23:35

An Equi-dimensional Finite Element Approach for Flow Problems in Fractured Porous Media

Authors: Marco Favino, Maria Giuseppina Chiara Nestola
Comments: 12 Pages. Eccomas 2020 - proceedings

We propose a novel approach for flow simulations in fractured porous media based on an equi-dimensional representation of the fractures and a standard continuous finite element (FE) method. We employ an adaptive mesh refinement strategy to automatically adjust an initial regular mesh to any fracture distribution with a desired accuracy. The proposed approach is easily implementable in any FE software, does not involve the coupling of different discretizations, and provides symmetric and positive definite stiffness matrices. We provide a systematic vali- dation of our method and we show that it can be used to simulate fluid flow for fracture networks of realistic complexity.
Category: Geophysics