A NUMERICAL SIMULATION TOOL OF SHIP NAVIGATION IN ICE UNDER VARIOUS ICE CONDITIONS

The performance of ships going through ice-covered water is a main focus of the design of such ships. Estimation of ships' ice-going performance has been a challenging task for decades due to the complexity in the modelling of ship-ice interaction process. To date, empirical formulae have been the mostly used method in ship design practice. Over the last decade, numerical simulation has emerged as an alternative technique for the evaluation of ships' ice-going performance. A ship-operation-in-ice simulator has been developed at Aalto University during the past few years. The simulator supports diversified operation senarios such as going straight ahead or turning in level ice, navigation through narrow ice channel, breaking out of channel, as well as going through compressive ice channel. The simulator is designed as a Matlab Application with user interface and as well support running through scripting. It requires light computation and can be executed with a normal PC within a relatively short time. This paper introduces its overall structure, modelling techniques and associated functionality. Examples of various operation scenarios are given to illustrate the functionality of the simulator. Comparisons with model scale tests and full-scale measurements are provided to demonstrate the validity of the simulator. Finally, the planned further development is described.