NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF CRUSHING AND BENDING FAILURE OF ICE USING SPH

The primary objective of this investigation is to simulate bending and crushing failure of sea ice in a local scale using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH), which being a mesh free method offers a lot of advantages over traditional grid based approaches. The numerical bending results are compared to earlier simulations of in-situ four-point bending test results and finite element simulations in terms of force, displacement and failure time whereas the crushing failure is compared with experiments conducted by Hausler. The comparison of these SPH-based numerical simulations with the available literature will serve as a basis to discuss the potential advantages and shortcomings of the mesh free particle method used to model failure of sea ice. Furthermore, this developed model will be extended further so as to simulate the actual behaviour of sea ice as ships progress through level ice.