Deokho Chae

Particle Spacing Analysis of Frozen Sand Specimens with Various Fine Contents by Micro X-ray Computed Tomography Scanning

The mechanical characteristics of frozen sand greatly depend on the frozen temperature and the fine contents according to the previous study by Chae et al. (2015). There are two hypotheses to explain this experimental results; one is the unfrozen water contents greatly affected by the fine contents and frozen temperature and the other is the sand particle spacing greatly affected by the pore-ice. To evaluate the latter hypothesis, the micro X-ray CT scan was performed. The micro X-ray CT scanning, one of the actively performed interdisciplinary research area, has a high resolution with micrometer unit allows to investigate internal structure of soils. In this study, X-ray CT technique was applied to investigate the effect of the frozen temperature and fine contents on the sand particle minimum and average spacing with the developed image processing techniques. Based on the spacing analysis, the frozen temperature and fine contents have little influence on the sand particle spacing in the frozen sand specimens.