Analysis of destabilizing moments due to dynamic fluid slosh within a partly-filled vehicular tank under braking and turning accelerations

A general three-dimensional nonlinear model is formulated to study the liquid slosh inside a partly filled cylindrical tank with and without baffles, while subjected to lateral and longitudinal acceleration fields arising from braking and turning maneuvers of a tank vehicle. The analyses are performed to investigate the significance of resulting destabilizing forces and moments caused by transient fluid slosh using the FLUENT software. The analyses are performed under varying magnitudes of maneuver-induced planar braking-in-a-turn accelerations and different fill volumes. The influence of baffles is further investigated under time varying longitudinal and lateral accelerations. The deviations in transient lateral and longitudinal forces, as well as the roll, pitch and yaw moments imposed on the tank structure, are obtained with respect to the corresponding quasimstatic solutions. The results show that the magnitudes of transient forces and moments are significantly larger than those obtained from steady-state or kineto-static solutions. The addition of baffles tends to limit the magnitudes of slosh forces not only in the longitudinal direction but also along the lateral axis.