Applicability of liquid air as novel cryogenic refrigerant for subsea tunnelling construction

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).