In severely cold regions in Japan, a conventional countermeasure for frost heaving is to replace silt and volcanic cohesive soil layer with non-frost material. The depth for replacement is determined by frost penetration depth as obtained from one-dimensional analysis only using freezing index. Therefore, thermal characteristics of materials composing railway track-bed are not considered. This paper examined applicability of advanced Berggren method as a new design method of freezing penetration depth. In this method, it is possible to take thermal characteristics of multilayer materials into consideration. In addition, we introduce experiments for determination of thermal characteristics.

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