One-dimensional Consolidation of Thawing Soils

The physics of consolidation of a thawing soil is formulated in terms of the well-known theories of heat conduction and of linear consolidation of a compressible soil. A moving boundary problem results, and closed form solutions have been obtained for several cases of practical interest. The results are presented in terms of normalized pore pressure distributions. It is shown that the excess pore pressures and the degree of consolidation in thawing soils depend primarily on the thaw consolidation ratio.