Investigations on sloshing mitigation using elastic baffles by coupling smoothed finite element method and decoupled finite particle method

Liquid sloshing in partially filled containers is widely observed in various engineering systems where the forces exerted by the liquid on tank walls may result in the instability of tank or even a structural failure. To enhance the hydrodynamic damping ratio and consequently decrease the sloshing forces, baffles have been designed as effective internal components inside containers in most of the practical engineering problems. In this work, we numerically investigate the sloshing mitigation using elastic baffles through our recently developed methodology based on the coupling strategy of smoothed finite element method (SFEM) and an improved version of smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) offering better accuracy. First, we simulate a benchmark problem of sloshing flow interacting with an elastic baffle installed in a container, and the numerical results agree well with the experimental data. Further, various cases are conducted to study the sloshing mitigation by using deformable baffles with different configurations and elasticities. Our current observations and findings based on the simulation results demonstrate that the impact pressure on the tank wall is significantly influenced by the geometric orientations and complex configurations of elastic baffles. The timing of sloshing flow impacting on the container wall can be passively controlled by adequately choosing the baffle elasticity. The damping performances of different elastic baffles are quantified by the numerically obtained Pressure-E-baffle lines. The relevant analysis in this paper can greatly help explore the effective solutions to mitigate the liquid sloshing in engineering systems. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.