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As offshore activities in the Arctic constitute a relatively new field with only a handful of relevant operations to draw experience from, and since full-scale trials are extremely expensive, there is an expressed need for much more extensive, detailed and cost-efficient analysis of concepts based on numerical simulations. However, until recently simulation tools of sufficient quality to perform such numerical analysis have not existed. The only verification available has been through a limited set of experiments in ice model basins. Today, this has changed, partly through the efforts at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) hosting SAMCoT (Centre for Research-based Innovation - Sustainable Arctic Marine and Coastal Technology), laying the foundation of a versatile and highly accurate high-fidelity numerical simulator for offshore structures in various ice conditions such as level ice, broken ice and ice ridges. Arctic Integrated Solutions AS (ArcISo) is a spin-off company from NTNU established in 2016 with the vision of increasing the technology readiness level of SAMCoT’s numerical models to become a professional software package for the analysis of sea ice actions and action effects on Arctic offshore and coastal structures. This software package is called Simulator for Arctic Marine Structures (SAMS) and it was first released in 2017. This paper introduces the software implementation and the theoretical basis of SAMS, and it discusses the use of full-scale data to validate the simulator.

In the autumn of 2015, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat (SPRS) performed a research cruise named the "Oden Arctic Technology Research Cruise 2015" (OATRC2015); it involved the two Swedish icebreakers, Oden and Frej, in the international waters north of Svalbard. The ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company supported and participated in OATRC2015. The overall objective of OATRC2015 was to perform a safe cruise, collect valuable and important scientific data, and conduct full-scale field trials to test key technologies. The scientific scope of OATRC2015 included three major fields of study, namely: 1) collection of full-scale data necessary to build, calibrate and validate numerical models for floaters in ice, 2) collection of full-scale data necessary to build, calibrate and validate numerical models for ice management operations, and 3) collection of data for health, safety and environmental research. This paper presents OATRC2015, including the objectives of the expedition, and provides an overview of the research performed and the major findings. In addition, the paper includes an extensive discussion on the use of full-scale data from OATRC2015 to validate the Simulator for Arctic Marine Structures (SAMS).

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