Numerical Study on Ice-Induced Loads on Ship Hulls in Ice Floe Regions

Abstract The reduction in polar ice coverage as a consequence of global warming has led to an increase in commercial ship traffic in the Arctic and the Antarctic waters. The floating ice region has gradually become an important ice condition in polar navigation under the long-term trend of global warming. In addition to causing a surge in ship resistance, the ice load acting in the normal direction of the hull will also pose a threat to the structural safety of the ship. Ice floes can have irregular shapes due to wind, waves, currents, and thermodynamics, which leads to differences in their interaction patterns with the ship hull. Ice-induced load characteristics are closely related to the type of ice floe and operating speeds of the ship. In this study, the authors use a viable analysis procedure to predict the ice-induced hull pressure characteristics for ships navigating in floe ice fields. Based on the CFD-DEM approach, a numerical tool verified by previous experiments is applied to explore the impacts of ice floe shapes, sizes and ship speeds on hull pressure characteristics, which also considers the water-ice effects on the hull. The Statistical analysis procedure is also applied to get the probability distributions of the ice pressure from numerical simulation and their characteristics are analyzed.