Experimental Study on Effect of Freeze and Thaw Cycles (FTC) on Creep Settlement of Silty Soil

Soil properties are affected by environmental conditions. Exposing of soil under multiple freeze thaw cycles may damage soil structure due to generated forces by water freezing and changes in mechanical and deformation features. Silty soils are highly susceptible for frost damage under the F-T cycles so, it is important to investigate their thermal and mechanical behavior. Thermal changes in susceptible soil often lead to irreversible creep deformation. The freeze and thaw cycles change soil engineering properties and mechanical behaviors by varying soil structure (Othman., 1992). A lot of research has devoted to study the effect of freeze-thaw cycles on the geotechnical properties of various soils (Wang et al., 2007). But, less laboratory works have studied the effect of freeze-thaw cycles on long term deformation and consolidation parameter of silty soil. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to determine the magnitude and rate of volume changes of soil specimen under 10 repeated cycles freeze and thaw which subjected to different vertical stresses.