Study on the Facilities and Procedures for Un-frozen Soil Erosion

Abstract. High erosion rate of seasonal un-frozen soils by snow- and ice-melting runoff in the high altitude and cold regions of China has great impacts on ecologic system, industries and people’s lives of the localities. The facilities and procedures are of great importance for the studies on simulating the erosion processes of melt frozen soil. This study focused on the method and facility for simulating the un-frozen process of frozen soil. The facility includes soil freezing system, melt-water supply system and experimental flume system for thawed soil erosion. The soil freezing system provides enough space to freeze soil columns in flumes. The water supply system deliveries constant-rate of snow- or ice-melting water flow at 0 ⁰C. Especially the experimental flume is assemble and is convenient for soil freezing before it is thawed in one-dimensional manner from top to bottom. The one-dimensional unfreezing process is realized as follow. The frozen soil flume is put on ice boxes and thermally insulated with heat-insulating materials all around to prevent the frozen soil from being thawed from sidewalls and bottom. The soil thawed with this system showed that it can meet the requirements of simulating the process of soil thawing from top to bottom. The equipment provides facility, method and operation process for one-dimensional soil thawing simulation to serve research on the effect of soil thawing depth on erosion process of un-frozen soil.