Mechanics of Ice-Lifting From a Flat Surface Through Penetration With a Sharp Blade

This paper is concerned with the mechanism of ice-lifting from a flat surface through penetration of the interface by means of a sharp blade. We first considered a static case in which the lifted ice was treated as an elastic Timoshenko beam of the cantilever type. The principle of the balance of energy was used in formulating the problem. Our objective was to find the relationship between the applied thrust and the length of the crack at the interface. Special attention has been focused on the instability phenomenon associated with crack propagation. An experimental program has been conducted for comparing the measured critical thrust for instability with the theoretical predictions. The static problem was then generalized to the case of dynamic loading where the sharp blade penetrated the interface through the action of an impact. In the dynamic case, the speed of the blade was found to decrease continuously when time increases. Our interest was to determine the relationship between the applied impulse and the maximum length of the crack generated at the interface.