This paper discusses the elastic and plastic stress and strain experienced by steel grillage structures during large-scale ice indentation tests undertaken in a laboratory setting. The work is part of the STePS~2 (Sustainable Technology for Polar Ships and Structures) project, a 5-year engineering research project at Memorial University. The present work builds on previous experiments and is a part of a multi-stage project to investigate high-energy ice-structure collisions. The current experiments involve artificial glacial (freshwater) ice blocks loaded into a grillage representative of full-scale ship structure. The ice block is quasi-statically crushed against the grillage, and load and response data is recorded. Raw data is acquired through a network of strain gauges, and other instruments. The experiments are also recorded through several high-speed cameras. The work is unique in the scale of the tests, using realistic grillages and ice blocks at forces and pressure loads representative of a real-world ship-ice interaction. During loading, the structural grillage undergoes extensive plastic deformation but displays tremendous overload capacity, much more than the material's yield point, while demonstrating significant remaining reserve strength.
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