High performance analysis of liquid sloshing in horizontal circular tanks with internal body by using IGA-SBFEM

Abstract

An isogeometric scaled boundary finite element method (IGA-SBFEM) using the non-uniform rational B-splines (NURBS) is firstly performed to investigate the liquid sloshing in the half-full horizontal circular cylindrical with the internal bodies. The proposed method can effectively maintain the advantages of the SBFEM, which combines the advantages of the finite element method and the boundary element method with its own unique characteristics, with the analytical solutions in the radial direction, and also can accurately improve the description of geometry on the boundary by using the NURBS, which brings out the flexibility to describe the complex geometry and presents some key improvements compared to the traditional SBFEM. The detailed derivation and solutions for the sloshing problems based on IGA-SBFEM, and the sloshing frequencies and the corresponding mode shapes and the dynamic sloshing characteristics are also presented by combining the multimodal method. The numerical results validate that this proposed method can acquire higher accuracy, efficiency and convergence with significantly fewer degrees of freedom than those of the traditional SBFEM, and the total number of degrees of freedom of IGA-SBFEM and SBFEM is far less than those of FEM which should be discretized in the entire domain. A detailed parametric study for estimating the influences of the key parameters involving the arrangement, shape, number and size of the internal bodies on the natural sloshing frequencies, mode shapes and sloshing forces and some interesting conclusions have been obtained.