ON THE DYNAMIC INTERACTION BETWEEN DRIFTING LEVEL ICE AND MOORED DOWNWARD CONICAL STRUCTURES: A CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF THE APPLICABILITY OF A BEAM MODEL FOR THE ICE

摘要

Downward conical structures are believed to be an interesting concept of a floating host for oil and gas developments in deeper Arctic waters. The conical structure forces the ice to fail in bending, thereby limiting the ice loads on the structure. During the last two years, several conical structures were investigated at the Hamburg Ship Model Basin (HSVA) as part of a Joint Industry Project.This paper presents a numerical model for drifting level ice interacting with a moored downward conical structure. The goal of this development was to get insight in the key processes that are important for the interaction process between moving ice and a floating structure. The level ice is modelled as a moving Euler-Bernoulli beam, whereas the moored offshore structure is modelled as a damped mass-spring system. The ice-structure interaction process is divided into two phases. During the first phase, the ice sheet bends down due to interaction with the structure until a critical bending moment is reached at a cross-section of the beam. At this moment, the beam is assumed to fail at the critical cross-section in a perfectly brittle manner. During the second phase, a broken off block of ice is pushed further down the slope of the structure. These phases were built into one, piece-wise in time continuous model.A key result found by means of the numerical analysis of the model is that the motions of the moored floating structure do not significantly influence the bending failure process of level ice. Also the influence of the in-plane deformation and the heterogeneity of ice on the bending failure process is negligible. As a consequence, the dynamic response of the structure is for the biggest part determined by the ice failure process. Although the response of the structure can be dynamically amplified due to resonance for some particular ice velocities, no frequency locking of the ice failure onto one of the natural frequencies of the structure was observed. The model output showed qualitative agreement with the HSVA test results. It was however concluded that one-dimensional beam-like models of level ice sheets cannot accurately predict loading frequencies on downward conical moored floating structures because the ice blocks that break off are too long. Modelling level ice in two dimensions using plate theory is expected to give better results, since it takes into account the curvature of a structure and both radial and circumferential ice failure.