Assessment of Fully Eulerian Phase-Field Framework for Ship Hydrodynamics With Ice Interaction

The harsh and dynamic environment of the Arctic poses significant challenges for ship design, particularly concerning the interaction between ship hull/propeller system and ice. The development of efficient and robust ice-going ships that can navigate ice fields with minimal resistance and local load on the hull, is an emerging application of fluid-structure interaction. Traditional methods of modeling ship-ice interaction often fail to capture the complex dynamics involved. High-fidelity numerical models are imperative to accurately predict the complex and coupled dynamics to optimize the design and operating parameters of ice-going ships. The complex hydrodynamics and contact dynamics involved in the ship-ice interaction result in structures undergoing large translational and rotational motions. In this paper, we present a first-of-its-kind parallelized 3D finite element solver as a powerful tool to model the ship-ice interaction. The unified continuum approach enables simulating multiphase dynamics across fluid and solid domains on a fixed Eulerian mesh. Interfaces are captured via a novel interface-preserving and geometry-preserving phase field method. We assess the proposed fully-Eulerian solver by modeling and analyzing submerged steel-ice contact dynamics as a relevant benchmark problem. Finally, a demonstration of a realistic ship entering an ice field follows, where we compare the ship resistance in an ice field against that in open water.