Uniaxial Constitutive Equation of Ice From Beam Tests

A method is proposed to obtain ice uniaxial stress, strain, strain-rate relations from beam tests. The basic advantage of the proposed analytical technique is that it is a direct method of reducing beam test data. So, no assumption is made with regard to the ice constitutive behavior. The proposed method is an extension of Gillis and Kelly’s procedure to account for different ice response in tension and compression. It is also an extension of the procedure reported by Mayville and Finnie to account for ice response dependence on strain rate. Furthermore, it is shown that the expressions presented by Mayville and Finnie are only valid when the bending moment, with respect to the zero strain axis, is assumed independent of the centroidal extensional strain. A simple example of a linear elastic beam with a Young’s modulus that varies linearly with the beam depth is worked out to show that these earlier given expressions are not applicable in that case.