Liquid sloshing in partly-filled laterally-excited cylindrical tanks equipped with multi baffles

• SBFEM with multimodal method are used to laterally-excited sloshing in cylindrical tanks with multi baffles.
• A new coordinate system and solving process for SBFEM with axisymmetric geometry are presented.
• Floating circular, wall-mounted ring and floating ring baffles or with inclination have been investigated.
• Solution by the proposed method has higher accuracy and efficient than that of the other methods.
• Effects of liquid fill level, baffled arrangement and length upon sloshing characteristics are investigated.

Baffles are used effectively to reduce the sloshing response of liquid in the liquid storage containers. This study is aimed at analysis of transient lateral sloshing in a partially-filled cylindrical tank with multi baffles including floating circular baffle, wall-mounted ring baffle, floating ring baffle and their combination form, and those baffles with inclination using a coupled multimodal method and scaled boundary finite element method (SBFEM). Slosh frequencies and mode shapes are initially estimated using the extending semi-analytical SBFEM by applying the linearized free surface boundary condition using the zoning method, where the liquid domain is firstly divided into several simple sub-domains so that the liquid velocity potential in each sub-domain has continuous boundary conditions of class C1. As a key point, a new type of local co-ordinate system for SBFEM with axisymmetric geometry is presented for each sub-domain. Based on the multimodal method, significant improvement in computational time is achieved by reducing the generalized eigenvalue problem to a standard one involving only the velocity potentials on the two-dimensional half free-surface length. The generalized coordinates of the free-surface oscillations under a lateral excitation are then obtained from superposition of the natural slosh modes. The sloshing mass and lateral slosh force are also formulated in terms of the generalized coordinates and hydrodynamic coefficients. The validity of the model is examined through comparisons with available other solutions, and the results show that the present method has higher accuracy and efficiency with a very small number of degrees of freedom for the simulation of the complex sloshing problem partly-filled laterally-excited cylindrical tanks. It is also shown that consideration of only the first sloshing mass is adequate to represent the dynamic behavior of the liquid container quite accurately. The effects of liquid fill level, baffled arrangement and length of those baffles upon the sloshing masses and sloshing forces are discussed in detail.