Laboratory study of ice floes collisions under wave action

Abstract

This paper examines the experimental data on ice floes collisions from the HYDRALAB+ Transnational Access project: Loads on Structure and Waves in Ice (LS-WICE). The paper quantifies the contribution from ice-floes collisions to wave energy attenuation. Time-domain and different frequency-domain analysis techniques are applied to analyse the data. Two different methods are proposed to identify collision contacts. Results of the different methods are generally similar and they show that the wave energy dissipated by collisions is approximately 10% of the total energy loss. In addition, collisions between ice floes induced by waves are nearly perfectly inelastic.