Japan Long-Term Visit: Cooperative Study of Sea Ice Physics

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This award will enable Prof. Robert Brown of Montana State University to collaborate with Dr. Kazuo Fujino and Dr. Toshiyuki Kawamura of Hokkaido University over a period of six months. They will investigate the formation and destruction of sea ice crystals in order to develop a microstructurally based constitutive theory for such crystals. Large single crystals of sea ice will be grown and tested, and the resulting data will be used to validate an elastic-viscoplastic equation for a single ice crystal based on microdynamical and thermodynamic principles. Eventually this work will be extended to a description of columnargrain polycrystalline sea ice. The purpose of this research is to increase our understanding of the physics of sea ice. Large sea ice crystals will be grown using techniques perfected by the Japanese collaborator, and techiques of stress analysis developed by the U.S. investigator will be used to construct a theoretical framework for the observed growth and subsequent microcracking dynamics. The testing program will involve, in addition to studies of single ice crystals grown in the Hokkaido University laboratory, reconciliation of results with those obtained on natural sea ice obtained at the Sea Ice Research Laboratory on the northern shore of the island of Hokkaido. This work has important implications in the field of ocean navigation.