Numerical Assessment for Stationary Structure (Kulluk) in Moving Broken Ice

Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) is vital to analyze many hydrodynamic associated multi-physics problems such as structure-ice-water interaction. In pack ice condition, broken ice pieces are floating around the structure and they affect the structure’s stationkeeping performance particularly a moored structure. Generally a moored structure should be supported by good ice management and the typical size of managed ice would be about 10 - 50 m. For this scenario, major parameters for the performance assessment would be appropriate hydrodynamic simulation, accurate ice friction calculation and ice clearing behavior. The aim of this paper is to assess the global loads of the moored structure (known as Kulluk) by moving broken ice floes that are basically managed ices. For hydrodynamic simulation, ALE (Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian) is used to assess the Fluid Structure Interaction (FSI) problem based on the penalty method. Combined hydrodynamic and structural assessment would provide better understanding of multi-physics problems without significant simplification. Three different ice concentrations (low, medium and high) are simulated and numerical results are compared and discussed with full-scale measurement data (Wright, 1999 and 2000).