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Ground freezing is a construction technique used in circumstances where soil needs to be stabilized so it will not collapse next to excavations, or to prevent contaminants spilled into soil from being leached away.
Ground freezing has been used for at least one hundred years.
Pipes are run through the soil to be frozen, and then refrigerants are run through the pipes, freezing the soil.
Frozen soil can be as hard as concrete.
Soil contaminated with radioactive elements that leaked from Japan's
Ground freezing is a construction technique used in circumstances where soil needs to be stabilized so it will not collapse next to excavations, or to prevent contaminants spilled into soil from being leached away.
Ground freezing has been used for at least one hundred years.
Pipes are run through the soil to be frozen, and then refrigerants are run through the pipes, freezing the soil.
Frozen soil can be as hard as concrete.
Soil contaminated with radioactive elements that leaked from Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant
The is a disabled nuclear power plant located on a site in the towns of Ōkuma and Futaba in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. The plant suffered major damage from the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on March 11, 2011. The ...
was contained through ground freezing.
A project in Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
known as the Big Dig
The Central Artery/Tunnel Project (CA/T Project), commonly known as the Big Dig, was a megaproject in Boston that rerouted the Central Artery of Interstate 93 (I-93), the chief highway through the heart of the city, into the 1.5-mile (2.4&n ...
used ground freezing during some of its tunneling, to allow its wide tunnels to be built under or through soil that supported existing infrastructure that would have been difficult or expensive to support using more traditional excavation methods.
Some ground freezing projects use common salt brine as the refrigerant, but other projects benefit from using more exotic refrigerants, like liquid nitrogen.
In northern Canada and arctic Alaska, passive pipe systems are used that do not require any external power to keep the ground frozen. These systems use in-ground evaporators and above-ground radiators filled with liquid refrigerant. When ambient temperatures fall below ground temperatures, the liquid vapor starts condensing in the radiator, reducing the pressure in the system causing the liquid in the evaporator to boil and evaporate. This process results in heat transfer from the ground to the air and keeps the ground in a permanent frozen state.
See also
*Pykrete
Pykrete is a frozen ice composite, originally made of approximately 14% sawdust or some other form of wood pulp (such as paper) and 86% ice by weight (6 to 1 by weight). During World War II, Geoffrey Pyke proposed it as a candidate material fo ...
, a composite building material which utilizes similar properties in frozen sawdust
References
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