Destruction of Ice using Pulsed Power

Summary form only given. Recently, the traffic on icebound sea tends to be important for development of natural resources production. For example, in the Northern Sakhalin offshore of Sea of Okhotsk, located to the north of Hokkaido, Japan, commercial production of crude oil and gas started. In previous paper, breaking of ice by shock wave produced by pulsed power generator has been proposed as a new method for operation of icebreakers in order to realize safe and quick navigation at the icebound sea, and demonstration of ice breaking was done using ice sample that simulates sea ice. As a next step, the characteristics of icebreaking on various parameters are needed. In this research, breaking energy, which is required to break the ice with a certain thickness, was estimated from experiments at which the thickness was changed. From the results, it was found that a breaking energy of 1000 J was needed for ice with a thickness of 100 mm. In addition, different kinds of shapes of electrodes were tried.