Computational slosh dynamics: theory and industrial application

The effect of liquid sloshing upon the performance, control, and acoustics of vehicles is becoming more pronounced with the increasing size of fuel tanks. Especially the fundamental natural frequency and the viscous damping rate are important quantities from an engineering point of view. Theory and industrial application for calculating numerically sloshing effects of viscous liquids within fuel tanks are presented for various container geometries. The numerical treatment uses the volume-of-fluid method for calculating the free surface flows. The efficiency and the error level of the chosen numerical approach are evaluated by academic benchmark tests. The industrial application presented covers a typical contemporary automotive fuel tank and its sloshing problems.