
Thermomechanical Response of Frozen Granular Materials Based on a Viscoelastic-Damage Model for Ice Bonds
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The mechanical behavior of frozen soils is primarily governed by the presence of ice and its interactions with soil particles. Key properties such as rate and temperature dependency can be effectively understood and modeled through a micromechanical approach that explicitly accounts for the soil and ice phases. This study presents a multiscale model in which frozen soil is represented as a granular system of spherical particles bonded by cohesive ice. A Voigt homogeneous strain assumption is employed to compute contact deformations, from which force changes are analytically determined using a constitutive model for ice. The ice response is characterized by a recently developed temperature-dependent viscoelastic-damage model. Contact force changes are then coarse-grained over contact orientations to derive global stress variations. The proposed model is used to investigate the behavior of frozen soil under complex thermomechanical loading paths, with a particular focus on how local contact damage translates in