Objectives   Arctic channel plays an increasingly significant role in ocean transportation. Polar ships inevitably encounter ice floe impacts in the Arctic channel. These impacts may cause some permanent structural deformations, which will result in some negative effects on their work performance. Therefore, to study the plastic deformation damage and energy absorption of the plate under ice impact loading, laboratory scale impact tests between the rectangular plate and freshwater ice wedges were performed.

  Methods   The plastic deformation damage and ice failure process were obtained from ice impact tests. Also, a digital simulation for a conically shaped iceberg colliding with a rigid wall is performed based on some existing ice models. The differences in results calculated by these ice models are analyzed. Based on the digital method, the plastic deformations and time history of impact force of clamped plates under ice impact are studied in this paper, which is validated with the test results.

  Results   The results show that the results calculated by these existing ice models have large differences, and the digital results using the isotropic elastic failure ice model are compared well with the test results. The plastic deformations and energy absorptions of the plates under ice impact are smaller than those of rigid indenter impacts in the same impact conditions.

  Conclusions  These works can provide valuable information for the safety assessment of polar ship structures.