Liquid sloshing has been one of the primary concerns in ocean and off-shore engineering due to its significant effects on ship stability and structure integrity. To investigate sloshing flow problems, a 3-dimensional Finite Volume Method based Fully Nonlinear Potential Flow (FNPF) model in the non-inertial coordinate system is developed in the present study. In this model, the Laplace equation is spatially discretised and solved using a second-order accurate finite volume method from the open source computational fluid dynamics software OpenFOAM. For the fully nonlinear free surface problems, both kinematic and dynamic boundary conditions at the free surface are implemented in the mixed-Eulerian-Lagrangian (MEL) form to update the free surface elevation and velocity potential respectively. The FNPF sloshing model is validated against a number of available experimental measurements and numerical results for test cases under di erent external excitations. Finally, the conclusions in terms of model accuracy and applicability are summarised based on the validation and application results. It is found that the proposed FVM based sloshing FNPF model is able to simulate fully nonlinear liquid sloshing process in the non-inertial coordinate system.
Liquid sloshing has been a long-standing engineering issue for aerospace, civil, and marine engineering, and plays an important role in ensuring structural stability and safety. Violent structural motions induced by external conditions, such as launch and recovery of spacecrafts, ship motion especially LNG tankers under waves and wind, and skyscrapers under the combined effects of earthquake, wind, and other environmental sources, may lead to significant sloshing flows and impulsive loading on structure walls. These loads, in turn, may affect the stability and safety of structures and eventually cause structural damage to container walls, such as tank rupture. On the other hand, liquid sloshing in tanks has long been utilised as a vibration and motion control device and examples include the tuned liquid damper in civil engineering applications and anti-roll tanks for mitigating the roll motion of ships. Therefore, a robust, accurate, and effective numerical model, which is able to capture fully nonlinear free surface problems, is desired to estimate the fluid sloshing process inside a container.
