MPS-FEM coupled method for sloshing flows in an elastic tank

As more and more liquid carriers with huge size are manufactured to support the transportation demand of natural resources, risks such as local deformation or even damage of cargo containment systems resulting from sloshing phenomenon subsequently increase, and it's necessary to take the elasticity of tank walls into account in the researches of sloshing phenomenon. In present paper, we numerically studied the interaction between liquid sloshing flow and elastic bulkheads of liquid carrier by fully Lagrangian particle method, MLParticle-SJTU solver, which is an in-house solver developed based on the moving particle semi-implicit (MPS) method. Coupled with the finite element method (FEM), the MLParticle-SJTU solver is extended to numerical analysis of elastic structural response due to the impact loads of sloshing flows. To validate the feasibility of the MPS-FEM coupled solver in dealing with fluid structure interaction (FSI) problems, a benchmark of dam-breaking flow interacting with elastic lateral wall is studied firstly and results show good agreement with published data. Then, the sloshing phenomenon in an elastic tank is numerically investigated. By varying the Young's modulus of tank walls, interesting characteristics regarding evolutions of free surface, variation of impact pressures, dynamic responses of the structures in both time and frequency domains are presented.