| Abstract: | Glacial ice features in the northern and central Barents Sea may threaten ships and offshore structures. Particularly, small glacial ice features, which are difficult to detect and manage by concurrent technologies, are of concern. Additionally, small glacial ice features are more susceptible to wave-driven oscillatory motions, which increases their pre-impact kinetic energy and may damage ships and offshore structures. This paper is part of three related papers. An initial paper (Monteban et al., 2020) studied glacial ice features’ drift, size distribution and encounter frequencies with an offshore structure in the Barents Sea. The following two papers (Paper I and Paper II) further performed glacial ice impact studies, including impact motion analysis (Paper I) and structural damage assessment (Paper II). This paper (Paper I) studies the wave-driven motion of small glacial ice features and their subsequent impact with a given offshore structure. The aim here is to develop a numerical model that is capable of efficiently calculating the relative motion between the ice feature and structure and to sample a sufficient amount of impact events from which statistical information can be obtained. The statistical information entails the distributions of the impact location and associated impact velocities. Given the distributions of the impact velocities at different locations, we can quantify the kinetic energy for related impact scenarios for a further structural damage assessment in Paper II (Yu et al., 2020).In Paper I, a numerical model that separately calculates the wave-driven oscillatory motion and the mean drift motion of small glacial ice features is proposed, implemented and validated. Practical and fit-for-purpose hydrodynamic simplifications are made to simulate and sample sufficient impact events. The numerical model has been favourably validated against existing numerical results and experimental data. A case study is presented where a 10 m wide glacial ice feature is drifting under the influence of surface waves towards an offshore structure. The case study shows that if an impact happens, the overall impact location and impact velocity can be best fitted by the Normal and Weibull distributions, respectively. Additionally, the impact velocity increases with impact height. Moreover, the impact velocity increases and the impact range is more dispersed in a higher sea state. It is also important to notice that the approaches and methods proposed in this paper adhere to and reflect the general requirements stated in ISO19906 (2019) and NORSOK N-003 (2017) for estimating the design kinetic energy for glacial ice impacts. |
