Hydroelastic linearized vibrations taking into account prestressed effects due to internal liquid weight: Numerical vs. experimental results

Abstract

This paper concerns the numerical simulation of the hydroelastic vibrations of an elastic tank containing a free surface liquid, around a geometrically nonlinear equilibrium configuration that takes into account the prestress effect due to the liquid weight. The computational methodology is the following. Firstly, the hydrostatic pressure on the fluid–structure interface is considered as a non-uniform follower force which depends on the liquid height. Therefore, the prestressed equilibrium at a given free-surface level, called current configuration in the paper, is computed as a geometrically nonlinear problem, in which the height of the liquid is considered as an evolution parameter. We start from an empty structure, defined as the reference configuration, which is progressively filled to reach the level of the chosen configuration. Therefore the calculation of hydroelastic vibrations of a tank filled with liquid as a function of a emptying rate is straightforward. The methodology is validated with experimental results extracted from literature.