Abstract
As the Arctic sea ice decreases due to various reasons such as global warming, the demand for ships and offshore structures operating in the Arctic region is steadily increasing. In the case of sea ice, the anisotropy is caused by the uncertainty inside the material. For most of the research, nevertheless, estimating the ice load has been treated deterministically. With regard to this, in this paper, a four-point bending strength analysis of an ice specimen was attempted using a stochastic finite element method. First, spatial distribution of the material properties used in the yield criterion was assumed to be a multivariate Gaussian random field. After that, a direct method, which is a sort of stochastic finite element method, and a sensitivity method using the sensitivity of response for random variables were proposed for calculating the probabilistic distribution of ice specimen strength. A parametric study was conducted with different mean vectors and correlation lengths for each material property used in the above procedure. The calculation time was about ten seconds for the direct method and about three minutes for the sensitivity methods. As the cohesion and correlation length increased, the mean value of the critical load and the standard deviation increased. On the contrary, they decreased as the friction angle increased. Also, in all cases, the direct and sensitivity methods yielded very similar results.