Buy article PDF
The purchased file will be sent to you
via email after the payment is completed.
US$ 35
|
Geomechanics and Engineering Volume 27, Number 2, October25 2021 , pages 179-187 DOI: https://doi.org/10.12989/gae.2021.27.2.179 |
|
|
|
Applicability of liquid air as novel cryogenic refrigerant for subsea tunnelling construction |
||
Youngjin Son, Tae Young Ko, Dongseop Lee, Jongmuk Won, In-Mo Lee and Hangseok Choi
|
||
| Abstract | ||
| The artificial ground freezing technique has been widely adopted in tunnel construction in order to impede heavy water flow and to reinforce weak sections during excavation. While liquid nitrogen is one of common cryogenic refrigerants particularly for rapid freezing, it has a serious potential risk of suffocation due to an abrupt increase in nitrogen content in the atmosphere after being vaporized. This paper introduces a novel cryogenic refrigerant, liquid air, and addresses the applicability of it by performing a series of laboratory chamber experiments. The key parameters for the application of artificial freezing using liquid air in subsea tunnel construction are freezing time and energy consumption, which were evaluated and discussed in this paper. The comparative study of these parameters between the use of liquid air and liquid nitrogen demonstrates that liquid air with no risk of suffocation can be a potential substitute for liquid nitrogen delivering the equivalent performance. In addition, the theoretical model was adopted to evaluate the chamber experiments in an effort to estimate the freezing time and the energy consumption ratio (energy consumption for maintaining the frozen state to the energy consumption for freezing soil specimens). | ||
| Key Words | ||
| artificial ground freezing; energy consumption ratio; freezing time; heat transfer; liquid air; refrigerant | ||
| Address | ||
| Youngjin Son: Eco Infra Solutions Team2, SK Ecoplant, Seoul, 03149, Republic of Korea Tae Young Ko: Department of Energy and Resources Engineering, Kangwon National University, Kangwon, 24341, Republic of Korea Dongseop Lee: POSCO, Incheon, 21998, Republic of Korea Jongmuk Won: Department of Civil Engineering, University of Ulsan, Ulsan, 44610, Republic of Korea In-Mo Lee and Hangseok Choi: School of Civil, Environmental, & Architectural Engineering, Korea University, Seoul, 02841, Republic of Korea | ||