ABSTRACT
Soils may be exposed to significant temperature variation in many geotechnical engineering problems. When a thermal load is applied to the soil surrounding a geotechnical structure, a change in pore fluid pressure may be observed due to the fact that the thermal expansion coefficients of the pore fluid and the soil particles are different. To model the behaviour of this thermally-induced excess pore fluid pressure, a robust coupled Thermo-Hydro-Mechanical (THM) finite element formulation is presented and employed in this study. subsequently, numerical analyses are carried out using the proposed formulation to model the coupled consolidation and heat transfer around a cylindrical heat source buried in saturated soils. The predicted temperature and excess pore fluid pressure are compared to the existing approximate analytical solutions available in the literature. Finally, a centrifuge test involving heating of a cylinder buried in clay is simulated and numerical predictions are compared to experimental measurements.
