Water Wave Interaction with a Structure in a Region with Ice Cover

• Main Author: Ren, Kang
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: UCL (University College London) 2020
• Subjects: Ice Sheet
• Online Access: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10092329/1/thesis.pdf; https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10092329/

In recent years, there is an increasing trend on the scientific, commercial and engineering activities in cold regions and polar oceans. The research on the interaction of water waves and structures in the region with ice cover has therefore received considerable attention. This thesis primarily considers two categories of such problems. On one hand, as a dominate feature of polar ocean, the existence of ice sheet can cause the working environment of ocean structures in icy water quite different from that in open water. When water waves propagate into the ice sheet, wave reflection and transmission occur at the ice edge, and the energy propagation is carried out in the form of hydroelastic waves due to the elastic deformation of the ice sheet. The hydrodynamic coefficients of ocean structures in waves under some typical ice conditions and their resonance features need to be investigated. The corresponding physical scenarios involve: the wave excited motion of a body floating on open water in a waterway confined between two semi-infinite ice sheets, the wave diffraction and radiation by a bottom-mounted vertical circular cylinder standing arbitrarily in a three-dimensional polynya, and the diffraction of hydroelastic waves by multiple vertical circular cylinders. On the other hand, the water surface in a channel may be frozen and covered by an ice sheet during severe winter in cold regions. The propagation of hydroelastic waves in channels is also quite different from free surface waves in the open water channel. Thus, an efficient solution procedure is developed to study hydroelastic waves propagating in a channel. The corresponding dispersion relationships, profiles of hydroelastic waves, and the strain distribution in the ice sheet are investigated.