The Tricky Water Energy Budget of Freezing Soil: A Thermodynamic Framework for Understanding Phase Changes

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In press

Accepted in Geotechnical and Geological Engineering on 19 August 2026. The DOI and full text will be linked here once the paper is published.

Summary

Water in soil does not all freeze at 0 °C: it freezes over a range of temperatures, largest pores first, and some of it never freezes at all. Three mechanisms keep that water liquid — capillarity, dissolved solutes and adsorption on mineral surfaces — and each is usually described with a model drawn from a different literature. This paper derives all three from a single expression for the chemical potential of pore water, links the soil water retention curve to the soil freezing characteristic curve through the generalised Clausius–Clapeyron relation, and closes the energy budget with enthalpy as the single conserved variable. The framework is theoretical; its assumptions are stated as a timescale criterion that can be checked for a given soil and forcing.

Thermodynamics | John Mohd Wani | Cryosphere Research

The Tricky Water Energy Budget of Freezing Soil: A Thermodynamic Framework for Understanding Phase Changes

Summary