Establishment of mechanical properties behaviour of frozen soils is discerned to be very important in designing the foundations of structures in permafrost regions and/or when ground freezing is resorted to. In some of these situations soils get frozen, and hence determination of their shear-strength, compressibility and volumetric deformations and its dependence on the rate of shearing, stress state, temperature becomes compressibility and volumetric deformations becomes essential.

In this context, in order to investigate the above-mentioned parameters of the partiallyor fully- saturated soils compacted to the desired dry-density, and subjected to different confining pressures, the setup DetFroSS has been developed. Our invention relates to a setup that is designed to determine the shear-strength and volumetric deformation undergone by frozen soil sample in its fully- or partially- saturated states, compacted to a target dry-density and subjected to different normal stresses, rate of shearing and temperature.