Simulator for Arctic Marine Structures (SAMS)

Abstract

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.

A Review of Computational Simulation Methods for a Ship Advancing in Broken Ice

“…The classical DEM adopts an explicit scheme using rigid blocks and is usually referred to as the Smooth Discrete Element Method (SDEM) [9], as being applied in [1,3,10]. The remaining work relevant to broken ice falls into the category of the non-smooth Discrete Element Method (NDEM), which adopts an implicit, non-smooth or event-driven scheme, e.g., [11][12][13]. The term DEM hereafter only refers to the SDEM, which is the classical DEM, while NDEM is used to distinguish other methods.…”

“…Contact modelling, ice breaking, and the effect of fluid flow are the three main issues associated with the computational modelling of ships in broken ice. The contact is usually modelled as elastic [14] or viscoelastic [10], and in some models, there is a plastic limit to mimic ice crushing [12]. Most of the existing models assume broken ice as rigid [10], which is relevant for broken ice of small size such as brash ice, ice ridge rubbles, sliding ice pieces, and small-size ice floes, of which a deformable response to a ship is negligible.…”

Numerical simulation of ship performance in level ice: A framework and a model

“…Such applications need numerical models to be able to handle different ice conditions in addition to level ice, e.g. ridged ice (Gong et al, 2019), floe ice field (Kim et al, 2019;Lubbad et al, 2018) and brash ice (Sorsimo et al, 2016). Efforts are needed to combine different models into an integrated model.…”

A Study on the Effectiveness of the Heading Control on the Mooring Line Tension and Position Offset for an Arctic Floating Structure under Complex Environmental Loads

“…To overcome these limitations, there are active research programs related to the simulation of ice-structure interactions. The numerical methods generally use the discrete element method (DEM), and simulations are being conducted on station-keeping in ice conditions, ice-structure interactions, and the navigation of ships in ice-covered waters [11][12][13]. To reduce the time required for the simulations, researchers used the graphical processing unit (GPU) to develop the GPU event mechanics (GEM) for use in acquiring a good floating-point calculation [14,15].…”