Experimental and Numerical Investigating the Effect of Baffle on the Shallow Water Sloshing in a Moving Tank using OpenFOAM Software

The motion of the liquid free surface in a container (sloshing phenomenon) inserts a momentum on the container walls. This makes a great disorder in the movement of the carrier vehicle or inserts a large force and momentum on the container walls. The reason for this phenomenon is the establishment of destructive waves and hydrodynamic forces. The side effects of this phenomenon in various industries, such as ship industries carrying liquid fuels, liquid fuel rocket industries, fuel tanks or water tanks, increase the importance of predictions of the behaviors of this phenomenon. One way of controlling is to use baffles or plates in the transverse direction of the tank. In this study, the governing equations on this phenomenon have been solved using the OpenFOAM software. This software solves partial differential equations using the finite volume method, which by default considers geometry to be three dimensional. In order to solve the two-phase flow, a modified volume of the fluid model (VOF) is applied and the moving mesh model is used for the movement of the container body. In the VOF method, the phases are expressed as a fraction of one (volume fraction). To determine this parameter, based on the continuity equation, a differential equation is regulated and solved. For the turbulent flow model, a modified k-e model is used by considering the effects of free-surface flows. Also, an experimental model of a real moving liquid container has been used for validation of the predictions of the presented simulation. The results show that the experimental and numerical results are in good accordance. In addition, the results show that using vertical baffles up to 50% can reduce the fluctuations caused by this phenomenon.