Page 24 - SAMCoT_2013

24 SAMCoT • ANNUAL REPORT 2013
Ice Management and Design Philosophy
The expansion of the petroleum industry towards the Arctic offshore presents new
challenges. The search for hydrocarbons in the deep Arctic waters requires the use of
drill ships and floating production units. Typically, these units require protection by using
ice management, i.e. the sum of all activities where the objective is to reduce or avoid
actions from any kind of ice features. Here the research in SAMCoT is directed toward
establishing a design philosophy for floating structures protected by ice management
which ensures the fulfilment of standard design requirements without being overly
conservative.
In order to address these general challenges according
to the industry partners innovation needs, several
research projects are carried out. These include:
• Alternative methods for quantifying the safety of
offshore structures protected by Ice Management
• Iceberg drift and towing in pack-ice
• Multi-scale modelling of iceberg drift and its
application to ice management
• Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV) for opera-
tions under ice: subsurface monitoring of sea ice
and icebergs
All of these projects undertake concrete challenges
experiencedby operation inArctic conditions. Nonecould
have been properly addressed without the insights from
the fundamental research into the physical phenomena
of ice. Of particular significance for this work has been
the valuable metocean data, sea-ice and iceberg drift
data that are made available by WP1 to researchers in
WP5. The data gathered concerning the properties of
sea-ice and ice ridges; and the material models devel-
oped by WP2 provide the basis for ice load calculations
which is very important to assess the success of an ice
management operation.