1994 Arctic Ocean Section
HullIce Interaction Load Measurements
on the CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent
David Stocks
A strategic objective of the Canadian Coast Guard Northern Operations
Programme is to support the scientific community in their requirements for
platforms to conduct investigations in the Canadian Arctic. A further depart-
mental objective, with respect to ensuring safety and environmental protection
in the Canadian Arctic, requires that regulations be developed for ships oper-
ating in these regions.
The U.S. and Canadian Coast Guards have, over the last decade, coopera-
tively executed an extensive program of iceship hull interaction investiga-
tions on ice-strengthened ships. This initiative was stimulated by the joint
need to develop structural standards for the design of ice-strengthened ships
and has, for the most part, focused on the most highly loaded area of the ships'
hull, the bow. Several ships have been instrumented for dedicated ice trials of
their bow areas, including the CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent and the USCGC
Polar Star. More recently the USCG and CCG combined their resources to
conduct experiments on the Swedish icebreaker Oden during its 1991 North
Pole voyage and the American icebreaker the Nathaniel B. Palmer during its
1992 voyage to the Antarctic.
The objective of this component of AOS-94 was to enhance the body of
knowledge with respect to the structural response of ice-strengthened ships,
specifically in areas of the ship's hull never before examined, such as the ship's
side aft of the bow and bottom forward, and in areas of Arctic ice never before
encountered by Western vessels. The benefits of this work are two-fold; first,
to aid in the development and verification of the Arctic Shipping Pollution
Prevention Regulations (structural standards), and second, to demonstrate and
prove the capability of the platform to support the scientific missions.
The project was jointly sponsored by the CCG and USCG, and contracts
were let to A.R. Engineering Ltd., Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and Science and
Technology Corporation, Columbia, Maryland, U.S.A. Three phases were con-
tracted:
The installation of instrumentation onboard the ship;
The acquisition of data during the voyage; and
The synthesis and analysis of data after the voyage.
David Stocks is with the Canadian Coast Guard in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
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