Forty three years of ice model testing in Finland

摘要

Ice model testing is relatively new field of activity compared to open water testing, which has been going on over hundred years. The first laboratory for testing ships in ice was established in Leningrad in 1955. In the middle of the 1960ies when oil had been found in Alaska, North Slope, the need emerged to study the possibility to transport the oil to the market with tankers through the North-West Passage. An existing 106000DWT tanker - SS Manhattan was chosen to be modified to do the job, see Figure 1. The design of the modification of the tanker was done by Waertsilae Shipbuilding in Finland as they had already gained experience from building icebreakers both to the Subarctic and Arctic conditions. At the same time during the planning of the full-scale experiment, Esso (Humble Oil), put the question on table whether the performance of the vessel could be modelled in an ice model basin. The idea was to study the possible consequences and alterations to the design when thinking of the future vessels. This turned out to be the start of ice model testing in Finland. There has been basically two entities performing model tests in ice in Finland, namely Waertsilae/Masa-Yards/Aker-Yards/Aker Arctic and Helsinki University of Technology (today Aalto University). The first one has had three laboratories mainly concentrating testing of ships. The latter operates a large 40m × 40m basin for testing of offshore structures and manoeuvring tests of large ship models.