A Review of Computational Simulation Methods for a Ship Advancing in Broken Ice

Apart from breaking level ice, polar ships can interact with broken ice in various scenarios. In recent years, computational simulation models have increasingly been used for the evaluation of ship operability under broken ice conditions, presenting some challenging issues. This paper reviews existing simulation methods used to estimate ship performance and ice loads for ships advancing continuously in broken ice fields. Models for different types of broken ice, including ice floes, ice ridges, brash ice, and sliding ice pieces, are reviewed separately. A ship’s response in broken ice is divided into two categories: resistance, which relates to the overall ship performance, and local loads, which relates to structural safety. This review shows that most existing models are proposed for unbreakable ice particles, which are only applicable to broken ice of small size; most models treat fluid flow with extensive simplification, which does not reflect the influence of a ship’s wake or bow waves, and most models are aimed at resistance estimation, adopting elastic or viscoelastic contact models which do not include ice crushing. As for future work, it is suggested that more effort should be assigned to simulating a ship’s interaction with ice ridges and sliding ice pieces, the modelling of breakable ice floes, and the coupling of the Discrete Element Method (DEM) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). More attention to the local ice load estimation is also encouraged.