Structure-fluid interaction model of tuned liquid dampers

A Lagrangian displacement-based fluid element has been developed to model large amplitude free surface motion of nearly incompressible viscous fluids in a tank of rectangular cross-section under dynamic excitation for tuned liquid damper applications. The penalty method is employed to enforce the nearly incompressible characteristic of fluids considering the non-linear effect of finite distortion of zero-shear and low-viscous fluid elements. The effectiveness of the proposed model was verified by experimental results from the literature. The results show that the proposed non-linear fluid element can predict non-linear behaviours of large amplitude sloshing due to dynamic excitation, especially at near-resonant region. The proposed fluid element can be conveniently incorporated into any existing general-purpose finite element program to serve as an effective tool for the analysis and design of tuned liquid dampers. Copyright (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.