The ultimate bearing capacity of ice beams

It is usually proposed that bearing capacity of the ice beam during its interaction with a sloping hydraulic structure is exhausted when tensile stresses in the beam’s cross-section reach some limit. But besides the tensile stress there is a compressive stress during the interaction with a sloping structure. This can change our estimations of the ultimate bearing capacity and load exerted on the structure. The purpose of the study was to estimate influence of the longitudinal compressive stress on the ice beam’s ultimate bearing capacity. The solution was obtained with the program complex LS-DYNA. Results of the mathematical modeling were compared with data of physical experiments conducted by Sodhi. Good correlation of the results gave possibility to conduct wide numerical experiments and to suggest corrections to the existing methodology.