Numerical Research on the Resistance Performance of a Ship Under Pack Ice Conditions

Abstract For a ship navigating in waterways covered by pack ices, the ice load including resistance prediction is a critical issue at the design stage, which is directly related to the safety of the ship, and it is of great significance to the research of ship propulsion efficiency. This paper adopts a coupled numerical method to simulate the ship-ice interaction under pack-ice conditions: the fluid flow is solved by Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) method, while the governing equations of ice is solved and the ship-ice and ice-ice collisions are simulated by the Discrete Element Method (DEM). In addition, this method is also capable of building a random pack ice field. The DEM-based ice particles are established according to the model test conditions and the parameters in a published reference. The comparison between the present results with the model test data and the results in another study by the Finite Element Method (FEM) under the same conditions shows that the numerical model established in this paper has higher accuracy in predicting ice resistance. On this basis, the influence of ship speed on the ice resistance under different concentrations of pack ice is investigated.