Author(s): Renat Yulmetov; Sveinung Loset; Raed Lubbad
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Keywords: No Keywords
Abstract: Highly concentrated and confined broken ice can be a serious threat for an offshore floater. To predict impacts from broken ice on a floater, the ice must be modelled as discontinuous, consisting of many independent rigid bodies representing ice floes. A single ice floe can be characterized by thickness, mean caliper diameter, area, roundness, etc. For broken ice, it is important to know the overall concentration and distributions of those characteristics over an area of interest. During the past decades, floe size distribution was surveyed using image analysis for different regions and scales. It has been shown that the mean caliper diameter may be distributed according to the power law. The value of the exponent is in the range of -3.7 to -1.0 and decreases slightly for the smaller floes. Recent models, based on physical engines, require floes’ positions and geometry as input. An effective algorithm for generation of random polygons is proposed. The algorithm can provide given concentrations, floe size distributions, and no overlap between floes in two-dimension (2D) within a reasonable calculation time.
Year: 2014