ERI: Predicting Freeze-Thaw Soil Behavior for More Resilient Cold-Region Infrastructure

This Engineering Research Initiation (ERI) award supports fundamental research to improve the safety and resilience of highways, airport runways, pipelines, building foundations, and other infrastructure constructed on soils that freeze and thaw. Rapid freezing can cause frost heave, cracking, and loss of stability, while repeated freezing and thawing can gradually weaken soils and produce long-term settlement. Existing engineering methods cannot reliably predict these short-term and long-term effects within a unified framework. It also remains unclear how much frozen ground may heave or settle over the coming decades as temperature and rainfall patterns become more variable and intense. This uncertainty limits the ability of engineers to design durable and cost-effective infrastructure in cold regions. This research will advance understanding of how ice formation and melting alter soil structure, strength, and deformation. The resulting knowledge and predictive tools will improve infrastructure reliability, reduce maintenance costs, and support national prosperity and public welfare. This project will also engage undergraduate and graduate students in laboratory testing, computational modeling, and data analysis. Hands-on outreach activities will introduce middle and high school students to civil and environmental engineering. This research will develop and validate a physics-based framework for predicting freeze-thaw soil behavior under rapidly changing as well as long-term thermal, hydraulic, and mechanical conditions. Laboratory experiments will measure ice formation and melting rates, changes in soil microstructure, and mechanical responses under controlled thermal and loading conditions. Imaging and sensor measurements will establish relationships among ice evolution, soil structure, and mechanical response. These results will inform a model that accounts for the changing mechanical role of ice as its content increases, from small crystals suspended in pore water to larger interconnected crystals that become part of the load-bearing solid skeleton. The model will capture rapid phase changes and the long-term deformation of both soil and ice, and will be incorporated into finite element simulations of laboratory and field conditions. Predictions will be evaluated using laboratory measurements and full-scale pavement experiments under controlled freezing and realistic traffic loading. The validated model will then support data-driven tools for evaluating frost protection, insulation, allowable loading, and maintenance strategies under safety, service-life, and cost constraints. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.