Simulation of ice action loads on off shore structures

During the last years, there has been an increasing amount of work published regarding simulation of ice action on structures using finite element models of the ice. The effect of ice fracture is in these models approximated using cohesive elements. In this article we give an overview of the cohesive element method for ice modelling including recent improvements made by the authors. A description is given of the implementation of the cohesive element method for modelling floating ice sheets in LS- DYNA including effects such as buoyancy. To demonstrate the performance and robustness of the implementation, numerical results are presented from a full scale simulation of an ice sheet impacting an offshore structure.