In-plane and out-of plane failure of an ice sheet using peridynamics

When dealing with ice structure interaction modeling, such as designs for offshore structures/icebreakers or predicting ice cover's bearing capacity for transportation, it is essential to determine the most important failure modes of ice. Structural properties, ice material properties, ice-structure interaction processes, and ice sheet geometries have significant effect on failure modes. In this paper two most frequently observed failure modes are studied; splitting failure mode for in-plane failure of finite ice sheet and out-of-plane failure of semi-infinite ice sheet. Peridynamic theory was used to determine the load necessary for in-plane failure of a finite ice sheet. Moreover, the relationship between radial crack initiation load and measured out-of-plane failure load for a semi-infinite ice sheet is established. To achieve this, two peridynamic models are developed. First model is a 2 dimensional bond based peridynamic model of a plate with initial crack used for the in-plane case. Second model is based on a Mindlin plate resting on a Winkler elastic foundation formulation for out-of-plane case. Numerical results obtained using peridynamics are compared against experimental results and a good agreement between the two approaches is obtained confirming capability of peridynamics for predicting in-plane and out-of-plane failure of ice sheets.