Simulation of a ship operating in an open-water ice channel

ABSTRACT

Modern ice breakers, using new technology, are now able to create channels through level ice and clean out the ice fragments, resulting in an open-water channel between two large ice sheets. Whilst this negates the potential resistance increase on a following vessel due to interacting with the broken ice pieces, the ship performance will still be influenced by the two large ice sheets on either side. The effect of such ice sheets on ships has to date not been studied in detail, so the channel effect is usually ignored during ship design processes and power estimates. The present paper reports on work to develop a computational model to simulate a ship advancing in an open-water ice channel and investigate the associated ship-wave-ice interaction. Based on a series of simulations, this work how the ship resistance and wake change with ship speed, channel width and ice thickness.

KEYWORDS:

• Ship
• ice channel
• wake
• resistance
• Computational Fluid Dynamics

Acknowledgements

The present paper has been facilitated by valuable suggestions from Professor Guoxiong Wu at University College London (UCL), Professor Jukka Tuhkuri at Aalto University and Mr Momchil Terziev at University of Strathclyde. The first author is grateful to Lloyds Register Foundation, UCL Faculty of Engineering Science and China Scholarship Council, for providing his PhD scholarship. The authors acknowledge the use of the UCL Grace High Performance Computing Facility (Grace@UCL), and associated support services, in the completion of this work.

Disclosure statement

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

ORCID

Luofeng Huang http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7096-7677

Giles Thomas http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6122-4329

Additional information

Funding

This work is part of a project that has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 723526 - SEDNA: Safe maritime operations under extreme conditions; the Arctic case.