SPH simulation of 2D sloshing flow in a rectangular tank

Sloshing is an important issue for LNG tanks and in general when partially filled tanks are on-board of a vessel. This resonance phenomenon may be connected with complex motions of the filled liquid that can couple with ship motions and can represent a danger for the tank structure and for the stability of the ship. The Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics method was applied to the violent sloshing flows in a two-dimensional rectangular tank under a harmonic sway excitation motion. A fully explicit predictor-corrector time stepping scheme was proposed, which uses the pressure Poisson equation in the corrector step to satisfy the incompressibility constraint. A method was introduced for identifying free surface particles and imposing the Dirichlet boundary condition on them. The no-slip boundary condition on solid boundaries was satisfied automatically by the proposed approach for dealing with boundary particles. Numerical simulations were performed for the Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering rectangular tank model, case indexes, i.e., LR2F1A1 and L-R2F1A2. This is an abstract of a paper presented at the Nineteenth (2009) International Offshore and Polar Engineering Conference Proceedings (Osaka, Japan 6/21-26/2009).