An ice material model for assessment of strain rate, temperature and confining pressure effects using finite element method

Journal article, 2019

This paper addresses an investigation of ice constitutive laws modeling with strain rate, temperature and confining pressure effects of interest in modeling ice compressive behaviour. For the proposed phenomenological model consisting of elastic, delayed elastic and viscous components, strain rate is taken into account by introducing a viscous term based on Glen’s law. The effects of temperature and confining pressure are also included in the ice model. With the consideration that the viscous term and delayed elastic term are affected by temperature, the pressure hardening and pressure softening phenomena are embedded in the constitutive model. The proposed three-dimensional constitutive model is implemented in explicit LS-DYNA as a user-defined material model, and the numerical simulations of constant strain rate and creep experiments are conducted to verify the proposed ice material model. Ice strength and strain-time curves at different strain rates, temperatures and confining pressures are obtained and compared with experimental results.