The artificial ground freezing method has been widely used in shield tunneling breakthrough working shafts. The freezing effect was mainly considered in the previous research, and the heat generation of the shield machine was not considered, which has great influence in actual engineering. In this paper, a coupling calculation model, considering phase change latent heat, is establishes that by containing the freezing process and heat generation of the shield machine, the model is verified. A numerical simulation is carried out for several working conditions that may occur in actual projects, and the following conclusions are obtained. Although the heat dissipated by the normal tunneling of the shield machine will melt the frozen soil curtain that originally meets the design requirements, the thickness of the frozen soil curtain after melting cannot reach the initial design, though it is still within the safe range. In the process of a continuous rotation working condition, the bottom and sides of a cup-shaped frozen soil curtain are partially melted in the early 6 day stay of the shield machine, and the thickness is reduced to a relatively stable value of 0.8 m. In a temporary shutdown working condition, when the contact surface temperature between the shield machine shell and the frozen soil drops to −12 °C after almost 4 days of shutdown, the shield machine may not keep tunneling forward due to the freezing effect. The research results will benefit the freezing design and management of the shield tunneling breakthrough working shaft under extreme conditions.

The freeze-sealing pipe roof (FSPR) method has been applied to the Gongbei tunnel of the Hongkong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge, which is the first application of this method in the world. The purpose of the ground-freezing method is soil waterproofing. Temperature is an important indicator for measuring the freezing effect; however, the FSPR method involves unsteady-state conjugate heat transfer between frozen soil, steel pipes, concrete, air, and other media. This paper proposes an unsteady-state conjugate heat transfer model and establishes a global solution algorithm of a strong coupling governing equation based on the virtual density method. Then, a calculation based on COMSOL software is realized and validated. The sensitivity of different factors such as initial formation temperature, different soil layers, and brine temperature on the freezing effect was studied by simulating the FSPR model. It is concluded that the brine temperature had a greater impact on the freezing effect, followed by the soil layer, whereas the formation temperature had the least impact. For muddy silty clay, if the brine temperature is −20 °C, it takes 44 days to meet the design requirements of 2 m. If the brine temperature is −30 °C, 27 days is enough. When the formation temperature is 20 °C, it takes 20 days for medium gravel sand to reach the thickness of the freezing curtain, and 32 days for muddy silty clay. Compared to other soil layers, the freezing effect of the medium gravel sand is relatively better. This research has a certain impetus to similar multimedia freezing heat transfer issues.