A Cohesive Model for Ice and its Verification with Tensile Splitting Tests

Ships and offshore structures operating in areas such as the Arctic have to be designed to withstand ice induced loads, e.g. from ice floe impact. This is mostly done with empirical methods, which have several drawbacks, e.g. they only give upper estimates of global loads. Numerical simulations of ice interaction are a desirable remedy, but their accuracy is currently limited if the material model doesn’t account for fracture processes. One approach is to use an elastic bulk material model along with the cohesive zone method (CZM) to model all inelastic deformation, i.e. fracture. Here, this approach is applied to simulate tensile splitting tests. The focus is on parameter identification and numerical instabilities for fine discretizations.