Design and Development of a Cheap Slosh Testing Rig as Laboratory Equipment

Liquid sloshing in container is a classic problem in fluid mechanics and many other engineering fields. Due to the complexity of fluid dynamics, sloshing is studied using analogical model. Different equivalent mechanical model of sloshing phenomena have been developed in the last century [4,6,7,9]. Each of these models can predict the sloshing behavior of fluid with a fairly good accuracy, but within some practical limit. As a result, sloshing is still a burning research topic in more modern fields like aerospace. The apparatus used for studying sloshing through experimentation, is called a “Slosh Testing Rig”. Building a full-fledged Slosh testing rig is very expensive due to the costly 6DOF load sensors, precise data acquisition boards and actuators. Recently, a very cheap slosh testing rig has been built using local technology for the hydrodynamics lab of Department of NAME, BUET as a part of the academic thesis. The rig has 1 Degree of freedom. Cheap microcontroller based data acquisition boards and several single axis load cells were used to lessen the cost. This paper contains the overall description of this rig.