Strength of undisturbed and reconstituted frozen soil at temperatures close to 0 ℃

The strength of warm frozen soils in permafrost is fundamentally significant to estimate and predict the ground settlements from construction activities. A study was therefore initiated to assess the strength and its behaviors of undisturbed and reconstituted frozen soils at temperatures close to 0 ℃. A series of triaxial compression tests(TCT) were performed by using a developed testing apparatus and a matching specimen-preparation method. The confinement was applied from air pressure, the temperature in the specimen was maintained using two-end refrigeration, and multi-stage loading on a single specimen was adopted to determine the strength. The test results showed that the strength, both for the undisturbed and reconstituted frozen-soil specimens, was significantly dependent on the temperatures and independent of the applied confining pressures. Additionally, the strength of undisturbed frozen soils was about 1.6 times more than that for reconstituted frozen soils. These observations were closely associated with the structures existing between pore-ice and gravels with large diameters.