Predicting ship ramming performance in thick level ice via experiments

ABSTRACT

Polar sailing ships employ continuous and ramming operations to break ice when sailing in the Arctic or Antarctic waters. Upon encountering ice above a certain thickness, including icebergs and ice ridges, ramming methods are employed. The ship sailing performance while ramming ice is difficult to predict under complex ice conditions. To provide an accurate prediction of the ship sailing performance during the ramming operation under thick level ice conditions, we constructed a model ship in an ice tank to simulate a polar scientific research ship ramming thick ice. The nondimensional numbers were analysed to determine the ramming capacity of the ship. The experimental results show that the navigation performance of a ship is related to the ramming speed, and the ship penetration distance and local load increase linearly with the ship speed. Improvements for future ship design are proposed based on the results obtained in this study.

KEYWORDS:

• Model tests
• ramming
• level ice
• icebreaking research vessel
• ship–ice interaction
• ice load

Acknowledgement

The authors are grateful to HSVA and CSSRC for technical support. We would like to thank the reviewers for their invaluable suggestions which have helped to improve the quality and consistency of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the High Tech Ship Research Project of MIIT [grant number 2017–614], the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 51909043] and the China Scholarship Council [grant number 202106680054].