Centrifugal Modeling of Ice Forces on Single Piles

by Ted S. Vinson, Oregon State Univ, Dep of Civil, Engineering, Corvallis, OR, USA,
Philip L. Wurst, Oregon State Univ, Dep of Civil, Engineering, Corvallis, OR, USA,



Document Type: Proceeding Paper

Part of: Civil Engineering in the Arctic Offshore

Abstract:

The ice forces and ice floe failure mechanisms associated with an ice sheet surrounding a vertical cylindrical pile were evaluated. A test system was developed to model ice forces in gravity environments from 1 to 50 g's on a small geotechnical centrifuge. The components of the test system included: an environmental model container in which ice sheets could be created and subsequently failed in flight on the centrifuge, and the instrumentation required to observe, control, measure, and record the freezing process and the failure phenomena. The experimental results associated with the ice failure were evaluated using dimensionless numbers, including the normalized force, the Froude number squared, the aspect ratio, and the g level. The ice failure mechanism at the onset of failure was compressional; as the pile continued to penetrate the ice sheet, the mechanism transitioned to a flexural failure. It was observed that maximum forces on the pile were measured at the onset of penetration.

Subject Headings: Ice | Failure analysis | Sheet piles | Centrifuge models | Pile tests | Offshore structures | Compression tests

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