Experimental study on sloshing reduction effects of baffles linked to a spring system

Abstract

The liquid sloshing phenomenon which damages the structures of various systems and affects their global motion of the system is one of the most important problems in naval architecture and ocean engineering. Thus far, several efforts have been attempted to reduce the fluid impact load induced by sloshing, such as the installation of additional equipment like baffles to avoid the resonance period with the tank or to restrain violent sloshing flow. In this paper, a concept of “moving baffles” is introduced, which is containing a spring system as one of the attempts for reducing sloshing impact. To observe the sloshing reduction effect of the moving baffles, a series of sloshing experiments considering the sway motion of a rectangular tank was conducted, and the experimental results for the case without any additional equipment were compared to those for the case with the baffles linked to two types of spring systems with different stiffness. The image, pressure, and force data were obtained through the sloshing experiments, and the effectiveness of the spring baffles was examined by comparing the statistical analysis results of the extremal probability and exceedance probability distribution.