The average temperature in Northern Canada has increased at a rate of nearly 3 times the global average and will continue to increase, thus accelerating permafrost to degradation. Permafrost is permanently frozen ground appearing beneath approximately half of Canada. The thawing of permafrost poses significant threats to the built environment, especially for civil and mining infrastructure in Canada’s north.
Artificial ground freezing (AGF) has historically been used to strengthen and stabilize underground structures through freezing soil. AGF is a multi-physics problem (e.g., heat transfer, mass diffusion, fluid flow, and solid mechanics). We establish reduced-order models to capture multi-physics phenomena in AGF, which can further be used as a mitigation strategy to fight against permafrost thawing due to climate change.
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Schematic diagram of a AGF system in (a) a 3-dimensional view, and (b) a cross-sectional view (Xu et al., 2020).