A Study on the Improvement of Measuring Method for Density of Model Ice

in the polar sea in order to carry out model tests. One of the most important task of the ice tank is to generate the model ice to have similar material properties as sea ice. The primary properties of sea ice which influence the ice performance of ice breakers and ice-strengthened vessels traveling in the polar sea are ice thickness, flexural strength, density, modulus of elasticity and crystal structure etc. Among them, since the density of model ice influences the buoyance resistance of ice for the ship model, the accurate measurement of ice density should be used to obtain the accurate analysis results from the model test. In this paper, some existing methods to measure the density of model ice are reviewed and a new one is proposed to measure it accurately and easily as possible. In this study, the measuring system including an UTM and several measuring devices was established to obtain the model ice density. Polyethylene and ice specimens are used for a series of repeatable measurement tests. From the results, it was recognized that both of the displacement method and the weight/weight methods gave the stable and favorable tendency. Ke ywords : Ice density(), Sea ice(), Ice model basin(), Model ice()