Glacial ice impacts: Part I: Wave-driven motion and small glacial ice feature impacts

Glacial ice features in the northern and central Barents Sea may threaten ships and offshore structures. Particularly, small glacial ice features, which are difficult to detect and manage by concurrent technologies, are of concern. Additionally, small glacial ice features are more susceptible to wav...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Marine Structures
Main Authors: Lu, Wenjun, Amdahl, Jørgen, Lubbad, Raed, Yu, Zhaolong, Løset, Sveinung
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Elsevier 2021
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/11250/3001537
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marstruc.2020.102850
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Summary:Glacial ice features in the northern and central Barents Sea may threaten ships and offshore structures. Particularly, small glacial ice features, which are difficult to detect and manage by concurrent technologies, are of concern. Additionally, small glacial ice features are more susceptible to wave-driven oscillatory motions, which increases their pre-impact kinetic energy and may damage ships and offshore structures. This paper is part of three related papers. An initial paper (Monteban et al., 2020) studied glacial ice features’ drift, size distribution and encounter frequencies with an offshore structure in the Barents Sea. The following two papers (Paper I and Paper II) further performed glacial ice impact studies, including impact motion analysis (Paper I) and structural damage assessment (Paper II). This paper (Paper I) studies the wave-driven motion of small glacial ice features and their subsequent impact with a given offshore structure. The aim here is to develop a numerical model that is capable of efficiently calculating the relative motion between the ice feature and structure and to sample a sufficient amount of impact events from which statistical information can be obtained. The statistical information entails the distributions of the impact location and associated impact velocities. Given the distributions of the impact velocities at different locations, we can quantify the kinetic energy for related impact scenarios for a further structural damage assessment in Paper II (Yu et al., 2020). publishedVersion