Fluid-structure interaction of a large ice sheet in waves

Abstract

With global warming, the ice-covered areas in the Arctic are being transformed into open water. This provides increased impetus for extensive maritime activities and attracts research interests in sea ice modelling. In the polar region, ice sheets can be several kilometres long and subjected to the effects of ocean waves. As its thickness to length ratio is very small, the wave response of such a large ice sheet, known as its hydroelastic response, is dominated by an elastic deformation rather than rigid body motions. In the past 25 years, sea ice hydroelasticity has been widely studied by theoretical models; however, recent experiments indicate that the ideal assumptions used for these theoretical models can cause considerable inaccuracies. This work proposes a numerical approach based on OpenFOAM to simulate the hydroelastic wave-ice interaction, with the Navier-Stokes equations describing the fluid domain, the St. Venant Kirchhoff solid model governing the ice deformation and a coupling scheme to achieve the fluid-structure interaction. Following validation against experiments, the proposed model has been shown capable of capturing phenomena that have not been included in current theoretical models. In particular, the developed model shows the capability to predict overwash, which is a ubiquitous polar phenomenon reported to be a key gap. The present model has the potential to be used to study wave-ice behaviours and the coupled wave-ice effect on marine structures.

A comparison of two ship performance models against full-scale measurements on a cargo ship on the Northern Sea Route

“…However, before the current work, the open-water SPMs have never been coupled with ice resistance algorithms to calculate FC for commercial ships. The majority of these ice resistance models are for operation in frozen seas such as the Baltic Sea in winter, either through consolidated ice fields or in ice channels created by icebreakers (Huang et al 2019). However, along the NSR in summer, the Arctic seaways are either free of ice or dominated by fragmented ice-floes.…”

Effects of Wave-Induced Sea Ice Break-Up and Mixing in a High-Resolution Coupled Ice-Ocean Model

“…Montiel et al [9] proposed a linear three-dimensional model of wave attenuation in the MIZ based on potential flow theory and reproduced the observed exponential attenuation of wave energy. Using a Fluid-Structure Interaction approach, Huang et al [10] investigated the hydroelastic wave-ice interactions and well predicted the influence of the ice sheet on wave transmission and reflection without overwash.…”

Time-Dependent Motion of a Floating Circular Elastic Plate

“…The solution due to a transient incident wave forcing was given in [34]. Recently, there has been extensive work on nonlinear simulations using computational fluid dynamics to investigate nonlinear phenomena [35][36][37][38]. However, even for the case of high amplitude waves, the linear wave problem remains valid for a floating plate [39], and this model continues to the basis of offshore engineering and scattering by an ice floe.…”