MIXED VARIATIONAL FORMULATION OF FINITE-ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF ACOUSTOELASTIC SLOSH FLUID-STRUCTURE INTERACTION

A general three-field variational principle is obtained for the motion of an acoustic fluid enclosed in a rigid or flexible container by the method of canonical decomposition applied to a modified form of the wave equation in the displacement potential. The general principle is specialized to a mixed two-field principle that contains the fluid displacement potential and pressure as independent fields. This principle contains a free parameter α. Semidiscrete finite-element equations of motion based on this principle are displayed and applied to the transient response and free-vibrations of the coupled fluid-structure problem. It is shown that a particular setting of α yields a rich set of formulations that can be customized to fit physical and computational requirements. The variational principle is then extended to handle slosh motions in a uniform gravity field, and used to derived semidiscrete equations of motion that account for such effects. © 1990 Academic Press Limited.