Reliability Against Drifting Ice—An Adjunct to Monte Carlo Simulation

Abstract

A method is presented for the calculation of the reliability of a structure against drifting ice subject to restrictions on the form of the ice load model and on the form of the probability distributions of the ice feature characteristics. The ice load model must have the form that the ice load is proportional to the product of the characteristics of the impacting ice feature raised to individual powers. Results from a Monte Carlo simulation program are presented to demonstrate that the ice loads for a number of useful ice interaction scenarios can be modeled by an equation of this form. The probability distributions of the ice feature characteristics must be from the log-normal family. A realistic example using publicly available ice data and ice load model is presented.