Ice-induced structural vibration generally decreases with an increase in structural width at the waterline. Definitions of wide/narrow ice-resistant conical structures, according to ice-induced vibration, are directly related to structure width, sea ice parameters, and clearing modes of broken ice. This paper proposes three clearing modes for broken ice acting on conical structures: complete clearing, temporary ice pile up, and ice pile up. In this paper, sea ice clearing modes and the formation requirements of dynamic ice force are analyzed to explore criteria determining wide/narrow ice-resistant conical structures. According to the direct measurement data of typical prototype structures, quantitative criteria of the ratio of a cone width at waterline (D) to sea ice thickness (h) is proposed. If the ratio is less than 30 (narrow conical structure), broken ice is completely cleared and a dynamic ice force is produced; however, if the ratio is larger than 50 (wide conical structure), the front stacking of broken ice or dynamic ice force will not occur.

To simulate the FPSO-iceberg collision process more accurately, an elastic-plastic iceberg material model considering temperature gradient effects is proposed and applied. The model behaves linearly elastic until it reaches the ‘Tsai-Wu’ yield surfaces, which are a series of concentric elliptical curves of different sizes. Decreasing temperature results in a large yield surface. Failure criteria, based on the influence of accumulated plastic strain and hydrostatic pressure, are built into the model. Based on published experimental data on the relationship between depth and temperature in icebergs, three typical iceberg temperature profiles are proposed. According to these, ice elements located at different depths have different temperatures. The model is incorporated into LS-DYNA using a user-defined subroutine and applied to a simulation of FPSO collisions with different types of icebergs. Simulated area-pressure curves are compared with design codes to validate the iceberg model. The influence of iceberg shape and temperature on the collision process is analyzed. It is indicated that FPSO structural damage not only depends on the relative strength between the iceberg and the structure, but also depends on the local shape of the iceberg.

In this study, we carried out model tests to investigate the ice failure process and the resistance experienced by a transport vessel navigating in the Arctic region in pack ice conditions. We tested different navigation velocities, ice plate sizes, and ice concentrations. During the tests, we closely observed several phenomena, including the modes of interaction of the iceship and the moving and failure modes of ice. We also measured the vessel resistances under different conditions. The test results indicate that the navigation velocity is a significant determinant of the moving and failure modes of ice. Moreover, vessel resistance is remarkably dependent on the ice concentration and navigation velocity. The variances of the mean and maximum resistance are also compared and discussed in detail.

This study investigates the resistance of a transport ship navigating in level ice by conducting a series of model tests in an ice tank at Tianjin University. The laboratory-scale model ship was mounted on a rigid carriage using a one-directional load cell and then towed through an ice sheet at different speeds. We observed the ice-breaking process at different parts of the ship and motion of the ice floes and measured the resistances under different speeds to determine the relationship between the ice-breaking process and ice resistance. The bending failure at the shoulder area was found to cause maximum resistance. Furthermore, we introduced the analytical method of Lindqvist (1989) for estimating ice resistance and then compared these calculated results with those from our model tests. The results indicate that the calculated total resistances are higher than those we determined in the model tests.

The effect of line voltage drop is considered larger on loads, especially on asynchronous motor, transformers and other non-linear load parameters in power system of large ships. A novel power flow method based on improved node voltage method is proposed, and a typical ship power system, which has 2 power stations and 10 nodes, with closed-loop design but open-loop operation, is taken as an example. Simulation results show that the improved power flow calculation method has achieved higher accuracy and better convergence.

A superimposed training (ST) based channel estimation method is presented that provides accurate estimation of a sparse underwater acoustic orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) channel while improving bandwidth transmission efficiency. A periodic low power training sequence is superimposed on the information sequence at the transmitter. The channel parameters can be estimated without consuming any extra system bandwidth, but an unknown information sequence can interfere with the ST channel estimation method, so in this paper, an iterative method was adopted to improve estimation performance. An underwater acoustic channel’s properties include large channel dimensions and a sparse structure, so a matching pursuit (MP) algorithm was used to estimate the nonzero taps, allowing the performance loss caused by additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) to be reduced. The results of computer simulations show that the proposed method has good channel estimation performance and can reduce the peak-to-average ratio of the OFDM channel as well.