Abstract
The existence of ice in ice-covered waters may cause damage to the propeller of polar ships, especially when massive ice floes are submerged around the hull. This paper aims to simulate an interaction process of a direct ice collision with a propeller based on the cohesive element method. A constitutive law is applied to model the ice material. The model of ice material is validated against model test results. The resulting impact loads acting on the contact surfaces and the corresponding ice block velocity are calculated in the time domain. The ice crushing, shearing and fracture failures are reproduced in the simulation. The convergence study with three meshing sizes of ice block is performed. To carry out a parametric study, five parameters are selected for analysis. These parameters are composed of rotational speed, direction of the propeller, initial speed of the ice block, contact position, and area between the ice and the propeller. The results show that the ice loads are affected by the five factors significantly. Ice loads tend to increase by decreasing the rotational speed, increasing the initial ice speed and the contact area, and changing the rotational direction from clockwise to counterclockwise. The effect of the contact position on the impact loads is relatively complex, depending on rotational speeds of the propeller.
Highlights
Arctic shipping has become increasingly attractive due to the huge economic value compared to traditional sea routes
The cohesive element method (CEM) is developed from the cohesive zone model (CZM), which is one of the finite element method (FEM) simulations
The ice block constituted hexahedral ice bulk elements and cohesive elements which are attached to bulk elements
Summary
Arctic shipping has become increasingly attractive due to the huge economic value compared to traditional sea routes. Ye et al [8] and Wang et al [9] simulated an ice-strengthened propeller-ice milling process and analyzed the main factors that may affect the ice load significantly with peridynamics theory. Another type of direct interaction is called an ice-propeller collision, under which ice block moves freely in 6 degrees of freedom (dofs) during the interaction. Khan et al [13] applied a numerical method to study the impact load for an ice-propeller collision. To give insight into the collision process, a rational propeller–ice collision model is built by using the cohesive element method to simulate the interaction. The convergence and parametric study are performed to analyze the main parameters that would affect the impact of ice loads
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