Combined Semi-analytical And Finite Element Approach For Hydro Structure Interactions During Sloshing Impacts - " Sloshel Project" Available to Purchase

The paper discusses the development of the combined semianalytical (fluid flow) and numerical FEM (structure) models for hydro structure interactions during the sloshing impacts in the tanks of the membrane type LNG carriers. This is a very challenging problem and lot of work, both experimental and numerical, has been done in the past. However, it is fair to say that no fully consistent solution exists up to now. Indeed, the small model tests, which are usually conducted in this context, suffer from scale effects and numerical CFD calculations suffer from numerous numerical problems and prohibitive CPU time requirements. There is a clear necessity for full scale measurements with the real LNG and the real containment system. Unfortunately this is technically extremely difficult and, up to now, there is no documented work on this, at least not in open literature. In the absence of the real full scale measurements, some "quasi" full scale measurements were performed. These measurements consist in impacting the real containment system structure through the drop tests technique Kim et all (2008), or through the more sophisticated wave generated impacts (Sloshel project - Malenica et al (2009), Brosset et al (2009)). The developments which are discussed in this paper were conducted within the Sloshel project which concentrated on the structural response of the real (full scale) containment system under the breaking wave impacts. Very rich and ambitious project objectives have been defined, with the final goal of improving the current methodologies used in the structural assessment of the containment system and the supporting ship structures. At the beginning of the project, it was decided that the effort in the numerical part would be concentrated on the development of semi-analytical methods for the local fluid flow, which will be combined with the complex structural FEM models for containment systems.