| Abstract | In Canada, Northern communities rely on a network of winter roads – seasonal roads that only exist in the winter – for their supply of fuel, construction supplies and other bulk goods. This infrastructure is particularly vulnerable to a warming climate, especially the segments that run over frozen lakes and rivers. The safe access to floating ice covers should address three questions: How much weight is the ice able to sustain? For how much time? At what speed? Ice reinforcement has been shown in the past to be effective in making the ice cover better withstand vertical loading. The National Research Council of Canada (NRC) is currently investigating this option further by doing laboratory work aimed at improving our understanding of ice reinforcement. An ice cover, grown inside the NRC ice tank in Ottawa, has been used for the production of a series of individual ice plates resting on circular loading frames 2.5 m in diameter. Each plate is loaded vertically with an actuator while forces and displacement are recorded. In this report, we demonstrate the feasibility of computational modeling, using the structural mechanics of the COMSOL software, to simulate the mechanical response of these plates. All simulations involve scenarios with at least two planes of symmetry and are validated against the laboratory data. Both non-reinforced and reinforced ice are explored, and the boundary conditions are taken into consideration. Only the initial deflections are being investigated (within a few seconds after loading), which is dominated by the ice elastic response. The outcome of this work should guide the reader into implementing her/his own simulations, so as to generate preliminary assessments of the ice response under various reinforcement scenarios. |
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