Numerical study on c-axis orientations of sea ice surface grown under calm sea conditions using a particle method and Voronoi dynamics

• Published in: Cold Regions Science and Technology
• Main Authors: Kawano, Yoshiki, Ohashi, Tetsuya
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2015
• Subjects: Anisotropic growth; C-axis orientations; Crystal growth model; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://kitami-it.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/7731/files/CRST_2014.pdf

Physical properties of frazil and grease ice depending on their microstructures are not easily measured, while they are important elements for predicting their behavior on the ocean surface. Thus, numerical models considering the effect of the microstructures are required to investigate the ice-water mixture. In this paper, we combined a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and crystal growth model, and numerically predicted a process of flotation and accumulation of crystal nuclei near the surface of calm sea, and their growth after the accumulation. The results obtained showed that the crystal fabrics and c-axis distributions had good similarity with those of an actual sea ice, and the combined model was effective for dealing with ice-water mixture. Thus far, while we have paid little attention to the details of c-axis distributions within the surface layer of sea ice because of their tedious investigation, the results also indicated that anisotropic growth of crystal nuclei, as well as the flotation and accumulation, strongly affects the c-axis distributions within the horizontal cross-sections of the surface layer of sea ice grown under calm sea conditions. This work would be an important step for the development of numerical models to predict the complex phenomena of sea ice depending on the microstructures, such as behavior of the ice-water mixture on the sea surface. journal article