  With global warming, the ice-covered areas in the Arctic are being
transformed into open water. This provides increased impetus for extensive
maritime activities and attracts research interests in sea ice modelling. In
the polar region, ice sheets can be several kilometres long and subjected to
the effects of ocean waves. As its thickness to length ratio is very small, the
wave response of such a large ice sheet, known as its hydroelastic response, is
dominated by an elastic deformation rather than rigid body motions. In the past
25 years, sea ice hydroelasticity has been widely studied by theoretical
models; however, recent experiments indicate that the ideal assumptions used
for these theoretical models can cause considerable inaccuracies. This work
proposes a numerical approach based on OpenFOAM to simulate the hydroelastic
wave-ice interaction, with the Navier-Stokes equations describing the fluid
domain, the St. Venant Kirchhoff solid model governing the ice deformation and
a coupling scheme to achieve the fluid-structure interaction. Following
validation against experiments, the proposed model has been shown capable of
capturing phenomena that have not been included in current theoretical models.
In particular, the developed model shows the capability to predict overwash,
which is a ubiquitous polar phenomenon reported to be a key gap. The present
model has the potential to be used to study wave-ice behaviours and the coupled
wave-ice effect on marine structures.
