Coupling Between Flexible Ship and Liquid Sloshing Using Potential Flow Analysis

Abstract

The significant increase in demand for Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) and the economic aspects of its transportation resulted in increases in the number and size of LNG carriers. One of the design issues for LNG carriers is the sloshing phenomenon because containment systems widely used nowadays have no internal structures. Furthermore, because the weights of ship and cargo are comparable and ship operators want more flexible operations allowing partial fillings in tanks, the coupling effect between ship motions and sloshing requires further investigation, including the effect of ship distortion. The previous study on coupling between rigid body and sloshing shows good agreement between methods of prediction and measurements [1,2]. Hence, in this paper the potential flow approach adopted for the coupling effect between rigid body ship motion and sloshing is extended to flexible ship-partially filled tank system, using the desingularised Rankine source method. In this case, the global deflection of the flexible ship is used for application of the body boundary condition on the partially filled tank. The aim of this paper is to investigate the influence of hull flexibility on the hydrodynamic forces and moments associated with liquid sloshing and vice versa, as well as the dynamic characteristics (e.g. resonance frequencies) of the whole system. As there are no experimental results available, the method is validated by comparing hydrodynamic forces from sloshing obtained using rigid and flexible body approaches. The coupling effect between flexible ship and sloshing in partially filled tanks is investigated for an idealized LNG Carrier in beam regular waves, considering different partial filling scenarios.