Effect of Double-Side Curved Baffle on Reducing Sloshing in Tanks under Surge and Pitch Excitations

Abstract

Sloshing is associated with the structural safety of liquid storage vessel. Installing the baffles inside the containers would be beneficial for the mitigating the damage due to the severe sloshing. In this study, an innovative type of double-side curved baffle was proposed to evaluate its effect on reducing sloshing in a rectangular tank under surge and pitch excitation. For comparison with conventional baffles, effects of the vertical baffle and the T-type baffle on mitigating sloshing were also studied experimentally and numerically by analyzing the free surface wave elevation as well as the hydrodynamic pressure on the tank wall. The effective stress at the double-side curved baffle along the height direction of the baffle is much smaller than that at the T-type baffle although they have the same mitigation effect on sloshing wave heights. The sloshing-induced effective stress on the double-side curved baffles was analyzed by varying their radian. Findings show that the effective stress on the baffle tends to decrease with the increase in the radian. The velocity field was presented to observe effect of the baffles on sloshing with the aid of ADINA and laboratory experiments conducted on a hexapod motion platform.