Simulation of Wave Interaction With a Circular Ice Floe

Abstract

Global warming is inducing sea ice retreat, which is opening new shipping routes and extending the accessible area for resource exploration. This encourages an increasing research interest in sea ice behavior. With the sea ice melting, level ice is broken up by waves propagated from the open ocean, resulting in an environment where both floating ice floes and waves exist. Such wave–ice interaction can bring significant influences on the potential human activities. This work presents a series of numerical simulations to predict the behavior of a circular ice floe forced by regular waves, with different wavelength and wave amplitude conditions being investigated. The numerical model was validated against experiments, and it revealed good accuracy in predicting the rigid body motion of an ice floe, including some extreme cases that are difficult to model by previous methods. Two specific behaviors were observed during the numerical simulations, namely overwash and scattering. Both behaviors are discussed in detail to analyze their linear/nonlinear effect on the ice floe motion. The applied model could be used to provide valuable estimations for arctic engineering purposes.