CFD Analysis of Sloshing Effect in a Rectangular Tank With and Without Baffles Under Linear Acceleration

Abstract

Sloshing is a random or violent movement of free surface of a liquid in a partially filled tank under certain excitation. In the current study the fuel tank is excited under linear acceleration. This liquid sloshing has many adverse effects in various fields such as dynamic instability in aerospace applications, structural failures and undesirable noise in specially designed vehicles which creates irritation…etc. The study focuses on to identifying the intensity and effect of internal sloshing in fuel tank by using a mathematical parameter which is mean deviation and to minimize the sloshing effect by optimizing various types of suppressing devices (baffles) in different positions. The research focused on the usage of three different heights of baffles with and without holes and also on horizontal baffle. The numerical analysis is done by using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) package i.e. ANSYS fluent 15.0 and validation is done with experimental results. To track the free surface interface Volume of Fluid (VOF) method along with turbulence model has been adapted. The comparisons have been plotted and an effective tool has been used to get comparisons among usages of various baffles.