Hydrodynamic aspects of moving vehicle with sloshing tanks

Freight vehicles with partially filled liquid tanks will be affected by liquid sloshing during transient motion. The sloshing induced by vehicle motion will lead to extra force on the vehicle and sometimes is a potential threat to safety. Previous studies on this problem usually use a mass-spring analogy to represent the sloshing effect of the liquid tank. Its main disadvantage is that CFD analysis or experimental study has to be performed beforehand, so that an equivalent mass-spring model can be constructed by curve fitting. In this paper, frequency domain boundary element method (BEM) and analytical solution to the sloshing problems are used to derive the modal equation and hydrodynamic parameters of the sloshing fluid. The accuracy of the results will be examined by comparison with available CFD results in the literature. The paper then evaluates the accuracy of equivalent mass-spring model and explores the possibility to approximate the sloshing effects inside cylindrical tanks by using analytical solution to the sloshing inside equivalent rectangular tanks.