Research progress of constitutive models of frozen soils: A review

In the past more than half a century, the constitutive models for geomaterials have been widely flourished. With the rapid development of economic, engineering infrastructures are booming in cold regions, including tunnels, highways, and so on. Besides, artificial freezing is used to solve the water-rich soft ground problem during the excavation of mines or tunnels. Building a highly applicable constitutive model of frozen soil will be helpful for the engineering practices where frozen soil is involved. Due to the existence of ice in soil matrix, there is a great difference in the mechanical behaviors of frozen soil and unfrozen soil. Correspondingly, it is more complicated to establish the constitutive model of frozen soil than that of unfrozen soil. So far, a great number of constitutive models of frozen soil based on different theories have been proposed. In this paper, firstly, the generally recognized basic mechanical properties of frozen soil are introduced. Secondly, the authors summarized various kinds of constitutive models of frozen soils, and analyzed their properties comprehensively. Finally, future research tends for constitutive models of frozen soil are proposed.