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Annual Report 2016
SAMCoT
MATERIAL MODELLING
In 2016, the activities carried out by the research group on Material Modelling came to a
conclusion and researchers in WPs 3, 4 & 6 have started to make use of the results provided.
Yared W. Bekele successfully defended his thesis on
Isogeometric Analysis of Coupled Problems in Porous
Media – Simulation of Ground Freezing on 19
th
May.
Bekele continued as a researcher within WP6 for the se-
cond semester of 2016, collaborating in the modelling of
the behaviour of unsaturated frozen soils with postdoc
Seyed Ali Amiri. Together they worked on incorporating
Amiri’s elastic-plastic model into Bekele’s THM model,
this approach is currently still in progress.
PhD candidate Anna Pustogvar spent a few weeks at the
beginning of the year working with assistant Professor
Arttu Polojärvi at Aalto University. Pustogvar is currently
working in Saint Petersburg and plans to defend her
PhD in 2017.
Sergey A. Kulyakhtin has completed his PhD research
and the defence will take place 21 June 2017. Kulyat-
hkin visited Aalto during the spring of 2016 to work with
Polojärvi. As a result, they presented a paper on the
continuum modelling of ice rubble at the International
Association of Hydro-Environment Engineering and
Research (IAHR) Ice Conference. The collaboration
between Kulyathkin and Polojärvi has continued, and
Polojärvi reciprocated the visit and spent one week at
NTNU in December 2016.
Currently Kulyathkin is working within the scope of
Fixed Structures in Ice taking his research further by
concentrating on the applicability and assessment of
limitation of the continuum modelling of Ice Rubble.
During 2015 and parts of 2016, NTNU/SAMCoT hosted
a guest PhD candidate from Dalian University of Te-
chnology (DUT) in China, Xiaodong Chen. The candidate
conducted fundamental experimental research on ice
consolidation, melting and heat transfer between ice
and water at the ice laboratory of the Department for
Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Chen designed a set-up allowing for submersion of
one-dimensional pieces of fresh and saline ice in fresh
and saline water. The samples were insulated from the
air, so the only heat and mass transfer was that between
the water and the ice. With these experiments we can
study and quantify fundamental differences between
saline and fresh water ice. One interesting result was
that the saline ice grew 1.6 times more in volume than
the fresh ice did when submerged in fresh water. Chen
also designed, built and calibrated a thermistor string
especially suited for measuring small temperature diffe-
rences. The results have so far resulted in one paper at
IAHR 2016, one accepted paper for POAC 2017 and will
provide the basis for several future publications.
Hege Lindbjør-Nilsen completed her MSc in FEM-CEL
simulations of full-scale and model-scale punch
tests on ice rubble with the Modified Cam clay model,
and started to work for Multiconsult. She addressed
numerical modelling of ice rubble including volumetric
properties and wrote and presented a paper for the IAHR
conference in 2016. Her work was relevant to SAMCoT’s
ice ridge action on fixed structures research.