Brittle failure of columnar freshwater ice under off-axis compression loading

Abstract

Several studies related to failure of columnar ice under biaxial compression loading have surfaced in the literature. The aim of the present study was to examine the failure of columnar freshwater ice in the brittle regime when the material column axes are misaligned with respect to the biaxial load axes. This is important because the relative position of the material axes in a floating ice sheet with respect to the structure indentation direction can be largely random, as in the case of river ice. Indeed, as shown later, such loading configurations are critical as the failure stress is reduced by almost a factor of 3 to 4 compared with the column-aligned loading.