Dynamic coupling between shallow-water sloshing and horizontal vehicle motion

The coupled motion between shallow-water sloshing in a moving vehicle and the vehicle dynamics is considered, with the vehicle dynamics restricted to horizontal motion. The paper is motivated by Cooker's experiments and theory for water waves in a suspended container. A new derivation of the coupled problem in the Eulerian fluid representation is given. However, it is found that transformation to a Lagrangian representation leads to a formulation which has nice properties for numerical simulation. In the Lagrangian representation, a simple and fast numerical algorithm with excellent energy conservation over long times, based on the Stormer-Verlet method, is implemented. Numerical simulations of the coupled dynamics in both the linear and non-linear case are presented.