  Whilst climate change is transforming the Arctic into a navigable ocean where
small ice floes are floating on the sea surface, the effect of such ice
conditions on ship performance has yet to be understood. The present work
combines a set of numerical methods to simulate the ship-wave-ice interaction
in such ice conditions. Particularly, Computational Fluid Dynamics is applied
to provide fluid solutions for the floes and it is incorporated with the
Discrete Element Method to govern ice motions and account for ship-ice/ice-ice
collisions, by which, the proposed approach innovatively includes wave effects
in the interaction. In addition, this work introduces two algorithms that can
implement computational models with natural ice-floe fields, which takes
randomness into consideration thus achieving high-fidelity modelling of the
problem. Following validation against experiments, the model is shown accurate
in predicting the ice-floe resistance of a ship, and then a series of
simulations are performed to investigate how the resistance is influenced by
ship speed, ice concentration, ice thickness and floe diameter. This paper
presents a useful approach that can provide power estimates for Arctic shipping
and has the potential to facilitate other polar engineering purposes.
