Dr. Lennart Fransson

The 2015 POAC Founders Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Dr. Lennart Fransson.

The 2015 POAC Founders Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Dr.Lennart Fransson, Senior Ice Researcher at the Luleâ University of Technology, Department of Civil, Environmental and Natural Resources Engineering.

Lennart attended his first POAC Conference in 1981 when it was held in Quebec, Canada. Since then he has attended 15 POAC conferences. His major area of research is applied ice mechanics often backed up with field studies in the Baltic. He started his PhD work with full-scale loading of ice sheets and used reinforced ice to carry heavy loads. Lots of ice beams were broken over the years when seasonal effects on flexural strength were studied together with the Swedish Armed Forces. Lennart is responsible for the regulations on bearing capacity of ice used by skaters as well as by entrepreneurs. He has had a small company selling ice core drills and other ice equipment for almost 30 years. Later on he became interested in ice loads on structures. Ice pressure on bridge piers were measured in Luleâ River and later he took the initiative to the well-known field studies at Norströmsgrund lighthouse in the Baltic. The contact phenomenon when ice is crushed has always been one of his favorite topics and at Norströmsgrund this could be studied in a bigger scale than before. Useful data from this European project has been published on the internet much thanks to Lennart. Today he is most interested in brash ice in harbours, modeling ice growth rate and resistance to ships. He is acting as supervisor for Victoria Bonath and Aniket Patil working with various aspects of brash ice.

Lennart hosted the POAC conference in Luleâ in 2009, the first POAC conference with only electronic proceedings. Lennart, was also the editor of the proceeding for the POAC 1989 conference held in Luleâ.

Photograph showing POAC President Sveinung Loset (left), Lennart Fransson (middle) and Walt Spring (right).