A New Capillary and Adsorption‒Force Model Predicting Hydraulic Conductivity of Soil During Freeze‒thaw Processes

Abstract Understanding the change in soil hydraulic conductivity with temperature is key to predicting groundwater flow and solute transport in cold regions. The most commonly used models for hydraulic conductivity during freeze‒thaw cycles only consider the flow of capillary water in the soil and neglect water flowing along thin films around the particle surface. This paper proposed a new hydraulic conductivity model of frozen soil via the Clausius–Clapeyron equation based on an unsaturated soil hydraulic conductivity model over the entire moisture range using an analogy between freeze‒thaw and dry‒wet processes in soils. The new model used a single equation to describe the conductivity behaviors resulting from both capillary and adsorption forces, thus accounting for the effect of both capillary water and thin liquid film around soil. By comparison with other existing models, the results demonstrated that the new model is applicable to various types of soils and that the predicted hydraulic conductivity is in the highest agreement with the observed data, while reducing the root mean square error by 38.9% compared to the van Genuchten–Mualem model. Finally, our new model was validated with thermal–hydrological benchmark problem and laboratory experiment result. The benchmark results indicated that the advective heat transfer was more significant, and the phase change was completed earlier when considering both capillary and adsorption forces than when only considering capillary forces. Furthermore, the coupled flow–heat model with the new hydraulic conductivity expression replicated well the results from a laboratory column experiment.