Oscillating Performance of A Rigid Buoy Floating Between Two Ice Sheets with Finite Lengths

Global warming has led to major melting of ice in the polar Arctic, making it possible to open Arctic shipping lanes. In this case, the large number of ice sheets are extremely dangerous for ship navigation, so in this paper, a body floating on water confined between two finite ice sheets is investigated. The linearized potential flow theory is adopted, and water is considered an incompressible ideal fluid with a finite depth of the fluid domain. The ice sheets are treated as elastic plates, and the problem is solved by matching eigenfunction expansion. The fluid domain is divided into sub-regions on the basis of the water surface conditions, and the velocity potential of the subdomains is expanded via the separated variable method. By utilizing the continuity of pressure and velocity at the interfaces of two neighboring regions, a system of linear equations is established to obtain the unknown coefficients in the expansion, which in turn leads to analytical solutions for different motion modes in different regions. The effects of different structural drafts, and different lengths of ice sheets on both sides, etc., on the hydrodynamic characteristics of floats are analyzed. The amplitude of motion of the float is explored, as is the wave elevation between the ice sheets and the float.