Interaction between Waves / Currents and Structures in an Ice-Covered Channel

• Main Author: Yang, Yifeng
• Other Authors: Guoxiong, Wu
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: UCL (University College London) 2023
• Subjects: Arctic; Global warming; Ice Sheet; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10181193/9/Yang_10181193_thesis.pdf; https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10181193/

The advent of global warming has given rise to promising prospects for the establishment of novel maritime transportation networks across the Arctic region. However, in order to protect the environment, engineering efforts in polar areas must carefully consider their ecological impact. This necessitates strict standards for the reliability of polar marine equipment, which leads to an increased research interest in hydrodynamic problems specific to polar and other cold regions. Compared with the general marine environment, the nature of wave and current loads in the polar environment is very different, and its unique floating ice will also have a complex impact on the hydrodynamic performance of the structure. In addition, for large-scale sea ice, waves propagate in the form of hydroelastic waves. How to accurately predict the load of ships, offshore platforms and other structures in sea ice environment is very important for engineering safety. Hence, this study established and solved some representative wave / current – ice sheet – structure coupled hydrodynamics problems. This study focuses on large extended ice sheets on the water surface and their interactions with waves, structures in a frozen channel. In contrast to free surface channels, hydroelastic waves in icy water channels exhibit strong coupling between water motion and ice sheet vibration, with significant influence from the physical conditions at the edges of the ice sheets. Consequently, hydrodynamics in icy water channels are much more complicated than those in free surface channels. Besides, due to the side walls, the wave-ice-ice sheet interactions in channels are also different from those in unbounded oceans. This thesis investigates the following physical scenarios in an ice-covered channel using the velocity potential theory for fluid flow and Kirchhoff-Love plate theory for ice sheets: 1). the interaction between a uniform current and a submerged horizontal cylinder in a channel with an ice cover; 2). the wave diffraction by a vertical ...