Peridynamic simulation of brittle-ice crushed by a vertical structure

Sea ice is the main factor affecting the safety of the Arctic engineering. However, traditional numerical methods derived from classical continuum mechanics have difficulties in resolving discontinuous problems like ice damage. In this paper, a non-local, meshfree numerical method called “peridynamics”, which is based on integral form, was applied to simulate the interaction between level ice and a cylindrical, vertical, rigid structure at different velocities. Ice in the simulation was freshwater ice and simplified as elastic-brittle material with a linear elastic constitutive model and critical equivalent strain criterion for material failure in state-based peridynamics. The ice forces obtained from peridynamic simulation are in the same order as experimental data. Numerical visualization shows advantages of applying peridynamics on ice damage. To study the repetitive nature of ice force, damage zone lengths of crushing failure were computed and conclude that damage zone lengths are 0.15-0.2 times as ice thickness.