Ice breaking has become one of the main problems faced by ships and other equipment operating in an ice-covered water region. New methods are always being pursued and studied to improve ice-breaking capabilities and efficiencies. Based on the strong damage capability, a high-speed water jet impact is proposed to be used to break an ice plate in contact with water. A series of experiments of water jet impacting ice were performed in a transparent water tank, where the water jets at tens of metres per second were generated by a home-made device and circular ice plates of various thicknesses and scales were produced in a cold room. The entire evolution of the water jet and ice was recorded by two high-speed cameras from the top and front views simultaneously. The focus was the responses of the ice plate, such as crack development and breakup, under the high-speed water jet loads, which involved compressible pressure ${P_1}$ and incompressible pressure ${P_2}$ . According to the main cause and crack development sequence, it was found that the damage of the ice could be roughly divided into five patterns. On this basis, the effects of water jet strength, ice thickness, ice plate size and boundary conditions were also investigated. Experiments validated the ice-breaking capability of the high-speed water jet, which could be a new auxiliary ice-breaking method in the future.

In most previous ice–ship interaction studies involving fluid effects, ice was taken as unbreakable. Building breakable level ice on water domain is still a big challenge in numerical simulation. This paper overcomes this difficulty and presents a numerical modeling of a ship moving in level ice on the water by using a one-way CFD-DEM (computational fluid dynamics-discrete element method) coupling method. The detailed numerical processes and techniques are introduced. The ice crack propagation process including radial and circular cracks have been observed. Numerical results are compared with previous experimental data and good agreement has been achieved. The results show that water resistance is an order of magnitude smaller than ice resistance during the ice-breaking process. Ice resistance shows strong oscillation along with ice failure process, which are affected by ship speed and ice thickness significantly.

High-pressure water jet technology, as a novel auxiliary ice-breaking method, demonstrated advantages in directional accuracy and environmentally friendly characteristics. This study conducted numerical simulations of high-pressure water jet ice-breaking processes using the Johnson–Holmquist II (JH-2) brittle ice constitutive model and arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian finite element method two-way coupling method, with model validity confirmed through comparisons with theoretical predictions and experimental data. The evolution mechanisms of radial and circumferential cracks were investigated through plastic strain distribution analysis under transient high-impact loading. The results indicated that the JH-2 model effectively captured ice's mechanical response and fracture behavior under high-speed impacts, with tensile-dominated failure identified as the primary damage mechanism. Three characteristic failure modes were observed within the parameter space: perforation failure, radial-circumferential cracks pattern, and radial crack pattern. Parametric studies systematically quantified the influence of jet velocity, ice thickness, and boundary conditions on ice-breaking performance. Furthermore, the developed numerical framework successfully addressed challenges in simulating complex fluid–structure interactions between high-pressure water jets and ice plates.

The hydroelastic symmetric response of a floating ice sheet caused by a pressure moving either in the ice lead or on the infinite ice sheet with a crack (a lead of zero width) is investigated. The ice sheet is modeled as a viscoelastic thin plate. The water is of constant depth. The flow under the ice is potential and linear. A boundary integral method (BIM) for the flow under the ice is combined with the finite difference method for the ice plate with free-free edge conditions to solve the coupled problem of linear hydroelasticity. Numerical results for deflections and stress distributions are shown to agree well with the available results by others. The proposed approach can be applied to problems with different edge conditions and different positions of the load with respect to the lead. The ice responses are studied with respect to the speed of the load. The speed can be subcritical, critical, and supercritical with respect to the critical speed for a floating infinite elastic plate. The speeds of the load, which provide maximum deflection, maximum stress, and maximum wave-making resistance, are determined. All these speeds are different and greater than the critical speed for an infinite elastic plate. The effect of the ice thickness, lead width, and load properties on these speeds is discussed.