The Contribution of Academician Yu. A. Shimansky to the Development of Arctic Shipbuilding

Abstract

Academician Yulian Alexandrovich Shimansky (1883–1962), an outstanding Russian scientist and shipbuilder, is known for his works in the field of structural mechanics, ship theory and ship design. His monograph “Conventional indicators of a vessel’s ice performance”, published as a separate volume of “Trudy Arkticheskogo nauchno-issledovatelskogo instituta [Proceedings of the Arctic Institute]” (ANII) in 1938, is well known to the specialists in sea ice technology. This work has played an important role in the development of sea ice technology and in designing icebreakers and ice-going vessels both in Russia / USSR and worldwide. The reviews of Shimansky’s contributions to Arctic shipbuilding are usually limited to the analysis of this work. The new materials from the archival documents and two publications that are practically unknown to the researchers allow to considerably broaden the knowledge about his role in the emergence of the studies on the vessels’ ice performance at one of the turning points in the development of sea ice technology: the creation of the first ever ice model basin. Immediately after the end of the Great Patriotic War in 1945, the ANII in Leningrad set out to implement the plans for the creation of the experimental base for studying the processes of icebreakers and ice-going vessels’ motion in ice, i. e. the ice model basin. Shimansky became actively engaged in this work from the very beginning. The archival documents demonstrate his role in the creation of the first ice model basin and the articles rediscovered by us allow to reconstruct the process of creating the theory of a vessel’s motion in ice by Shimansky that is still employed in all ice model basins across the world.