Abstract
Damage due to ice collision is the most serious threat for the structural safety of ships operating in arctic region. Since such hull damages are usually caused by the collision of floating ice at excessive voyage speed of ships, the authorities responsible for the shipping at arctic sea are required to provide the speed limit for safe voyage, so-called safe speed. In countries near arctic ocean, such as Canada and Russia, empirical methods to determine the safe speed of ships based on their long experience of arctic voyage have been established and applied them in the real arctic navigation. However, in Korea, it is not easy to accumulate the arctic voyage experience and related technical database, so it seems to be a realistic approach to adopt a safe voyage speed estimating method in arctic sea based on the ice collision simulation technology using the nonlinear finite element analysis. The aim of this study is to develop a technique for estimating the safe voyage speed of vessels operating at arctic sea through the ice collision analysis, In order to achieve this goal, the standard procedure of the ice collision analysis is dealt with and example analysis was carried out and the results were considered. To investigate the validity of developed method, POLARIS system proposed by IMO was studied for comparison.