In this paper the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method is applied to the violent sloshing flows in a 2D rectangular tank under a harmonic sway excitation motion. A fully explicit predictor-corrector time stepping scheme is proposed which uses the pressure Poisson equation in the corrector step to satisfy the incompressibility constraint. A method is introduced for identifying free surface particles and imposing the Dirichlet boundary condition on them. The no-slip boundary condition on solid boundaries is satisfied automatically by the proposed approach for dealing with boundary particles. Numerical simulations have been performed for the Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering (DSME) rectangular tank model, case indexes: LR2F1A1, L-R2F1A2.
Free surface sloshing in a moving container constitutes a problem of great practical importance with regard to the safety of transportation systems, such as tank trucks on highways, liquid tank cars on railroads and sloshing of liquid cargo in ocean-going vessels. Sloshing is an important issue for Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) tanks and in general when partially filled tanks are on-board of a vessel. This resonance phenomenon may be connected with complex motions of the filled liquid that can couple with ship motions and can represent a danger for the tank structure and for the stability of the ship. On the other hand when the frequency of the tank motion is close to the natural frequency of the interaction between the structure and the sloshing fluid, the fluid motion exerts high impact load on the tank wall. At certain filling ratio it may also create high impact loads on the ceiling of the tank causing structural damage. Therefore identifying the behavior of the fluid flow during sloshing is crucial in the design of the tanks (Akyildiz et al., 2005; Kim et al., 2005).
