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Shedding light on ocean wave-ice sheet interactions with a harbored ship

MAY 14, 2021
Using domain decomposition, thin ice sheets increase ship or harbor wall damage, but thicker sheets prove less destructive.

DOI: 10.1063/10.0005056

Shedding light on ocean wave-ice sheet interactions with a harbored ship internal name

Shedding light on ocean wave-ice sheet interactions with a harbored ship lead image

With shrinking ice and rising water levels indicating the Arctic Ocean could soon become a viable shipping route, there is growing interest in studying wave-ice sheet interactions in assessing the safety of natural and manmade harbors.

Li et al. incorporated a domain decomposition method, commonly used in parallel computing, to shed light on the mechanics of complex fluid water-ice sheet interactions on moving ships.

They found when the ice is relatively thin, the wave motion amplitude inside the harbor is larger than when there is no ice, indicating a much larger wave load on the harbor or the ship within it. When the ice sheet is thicker, however, these amplifications attenuate.

Harbors are used for protection against intense surface waves. However, wave resonance within these areas can cause unexpected wave amplification, contributing to ship or harbor wall damage.

Research to address this challenge is based mostly on harbor wall shape. In their paper, researchers focused on the fundamental dynamics between water flows inside and outside of the wall and their effects on a ship within the harbor.

The work builds on previous research investigating wave interactions of incoming and outgoing water flow. Unlike in the open sea, the motion curve of a ship against wave frequency in a harbor has multiple peaks, indicating a large hydrodynamic load on the ship and, therefore, potentially diminishing harbor protection.

Source: “Interaction of ocean wave with a harbor covered by an ice sheet,” by Zhifu Li, Yuyun Shi, and Guo Xiong Wu, Physics of Fluids (2021). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0051376 .

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