Experimental and Numerical Investigations of a Ship-Shaped, Turret-Moored Floating Structure in Intact and Managed Sea Ice Conditions

This paper presents a performance evaluation method of a floating, geo-stationary structure in sea ice. Using a turret-moored drillship as an example, the paper explains an approach to efficiently combine model-scale experiments and numerical simulations to analyze ice-structure interactions. A novel numerical simulation tool - Statoil's SIBIS model - is used to investigate the performance of the drillship concept in various design ice conditions. The presented method allows cost-efficient performance evaluations of ice-capable platforms throughout the early-phase design process, and leads to increased safety and commerciality of exploration operations in the Arctic.