Prof. D. N. Singh

SOMENATH MONDAL

Ph. D.
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai, India mondalsomenath1@gmail.com

INVESTIGATIONS ON HEAT MIGRATION IN SOIL MASS

The contemporary practices of geotechnical engineering (viz., design of waste disposal systems, in particular the radioactive waste repositories, thermal backfills, oil storage tanks, oil pipelines, air conditioning ducts, buried conduits and electrical cables, solar ponds, energy geostructures, furnaces, boiler units, forging units, brick kilns, rocket launching pads and soil stabilization) necessitate investigations to understand how heat migrates in the soil mass. Also, in the realm of soil science, soil microbiology, agronomy and forest micrometeorology, such investigations are much warranted. In all these situations, either a ?heat source?, which is embedded in the soil mass, or ?bio-geo-chemical processes?, which trigger due to various activities, might cause migration of heat in it. This inturn results in development of the thermal regime (i.e., temperature and heat flux) and its spatial and temporal prediction becomes inevitable. With this in view, efforts have been made to establish experimental methodologies which facilitate estimation of thermal regime in dry sands, which have been chosen for the sake of ease of experimentation and to avoid the complications that clays exhibit (i.e., drying induced shrinkage and cracking). Efforts have also been made to utilize these methodologies for determination of thermal conductivity of the dry sands. Moreover, a computationally simple and efficient mathematical framework, referred as ATHERES (Algorithm for Thermal Regime Estimation in Soils) has been developed to compute thermal regime in dry sands, easily and efficiently.