Ship resistance when operating in floating ice floes: a combined CFD&DEM approach

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel combined CFD and DEM numerical approach to simulate ship resistance in floating ice floes, accounting for wave effects, ice motions, and collisions, validated against experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a high-fidelity modeling method integrating wave effects with ice-ship interactions, including algorithms for natural ice-floe fields with randomness.

Findings

Model accurately predicts ice-floe resistance after validation.

Resistance increases with ship speed, ice concentration, and ice thickness.

Floe diameter significantly influences ship resistance.

Abstract

Whilst climate change is transforming the Arctic into a navigable ocean where small ice floes are floating on the sea surface, the effect of such ice conditions on ship performance has yet to be understood. The present work combines a set of numerical methods to simulate the ship-wave-ice interaction in such ice conditions. Particularly, Computational Fluid Dynamics is applied to provide fluid solutions for the floes and it is incorporated with the Discrete Element Method to govern ice motions and account for ship-ice/ice-ice collisions, by which, the proposed approach innovatively includes wave effects in the interaction. In addition, this work introduces two algorithms that can implement computational models with natural ice-floe fields, which takes randomness into consideration thus achieving high-fidelity modelling of the problem. Following validation against experiments, the model is shown accurate in predicting the ice-floe resistance of a ship, and then a series of simulations are performed to investigate how the resistance is influenced by ship speed, ice concentration, ice thickness and floe diameter. This paper presents a useful approach that can provide power estimates for Arctic shipping and has the potential to facilitate other polar engineering purposes.