Ahmed A

Al-Maruf MA

Dev AK

Hannan MA

Diminishing ice presence in the Arctic provides the potential forextended operable period for oil and gas exploration in theArctic. Floaters are a flexible solution for such scenario whereasthey can fully take advantage of the extended drilling season aswell as operate in other harsh environment regions during theoff-season. Such floaters can disconnect and reconnect to avoidlarge ice features such as icebergs and multi-year ice ridges.However, they still need to encounter relatively large level ice.Accompanying icebreakers will ideally assist in breaking thelevel ice into manageable pieces. The interaction of such levelice floes with floater has a significant influence on the dynamicice load on the floater and resulting mooring load. There issignificant uncertainty in the simulation of level ice-floaterinteraction numerically. Most of the current research focuses onthe influence of ice breaking and subsequent flow of the brokenice around the floater. However, the hydrodynamic load due tothe incoming level ice will also affect the response of the floater,which is usually not simulated. A recent study simulated themultibody hydrodynamics of level ice and floater Suchmultibody hydrodynamic analysis is computationally expensive,and complexity in the modelling is a hindrance to itsimplementation in the design phase. The present study, therefore,employs a conservative estimation to include the effect of waveload on the floater in addition to the ice load. Parametric studiesare performed to estimate this effect by varying the incomingwave amplitude and wave period, ice sheet thickness, ice driftvelocity, floater’s hull angle, mooring stiffness and the distanceof large ice-sheet from the floater. Significant impacts of waveson the floater in terms of total force are observed which clearlyreflects the importance of this study. The effect of mooringstiffness on total load is also investigated at the end of this studywhich can be considered as a foundation for further research onoptimizing the mooring stiffness for such kind of arctic floater

Preliminary Analytical Formulation of Ice-Floater Interactions Including The Effect of Wave Load

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