Ship Movement Peculiarities in Real Ice Environments: Theoretical and Experimental Approaches
摘要
Ice environments in the Nature are infinitely various. The albums of ice features contain over 100 descriptions of different ice types. Evidently, no ship design or ship movement research can cover each and every ice environment existing in the world. Therefore, marine ice engineering has a certain set of reference ice conditions used for tests (typically model-scale ones) and new ship designs. Initially, reference ice conditions were only two in number: level and broken ice. Later on, the ridges were added to the list, so the number of reference ice conditions became three. Current trends in the development of Arctic shipping systems make it necessary to further expand this list of reference ice conditions. The changes brought about in the Arctic shipping by the twenty-first century urgently demand more knowledge about ice resistance of ships moving in packed, brash, and compact drifting ice environments. Over the last decade, this challenge has been taken by many experts. Their research efforts have two main paths: development of theoretical calculation techniques for ice resistance of ships in these conditions and development of adequate simulation methods to study the physics behind ice interaction phenomena. This chapter will discuss latest trends in ice navigation research, including the movement or large ships in the ice environments that became relevant only recently, e.g., small and medium floe fields, brash ice, compact, and concentrated drifting ice.