Influence of a vertical baffle on suppressing sway motion response of a tank coupled with sloshing actions in waves

Abstract

The present work is a direct extension of our previous work in Jiang and Bai (2020) where the sway motion response of a box section coupled with an internal sloshing flow was studied. In the present work, vertical baffles are equipped at the bottom of the internal tank, and the influence of the vertical baffles on suppressing the internal sloshing flow as well as the sway response of the system in waves is assessed. The IRF method and the CFD simulation are applied to consider the internal and external fluid flows, respectively. Numerical simulations show that the increased vertical baffle height can generate a more significant effect on suppressing the coupled sloshing action, where the sway motion amplitudes of the baffled sloshing tank tend to the empty tank results. Whether the internal sloshing flow breaks or not seems to play an important role in affecting the sway response of the tank. The vertical baffle can block the sloshing flow and generate a significant effect on the sway motion response when the sloshing flow is of the breaking pattern. For a specific relative vertical baffle height, the shallow filling depth or the large incident wave amplitude is more prone to generate the breaking sloshing flow, and hence better suppressing action can be obtained. As for the non-breaking sloshing flow motion, the vertical baffle is hard to generate the evident effect on the minimal and maximal sway motion amplitudes, but it can cause the variation of frequency range of the essential coupled sloshing action. Generally speaking, the vertical baffle is an effective method for suppressing the sway motion response of the sloshing tank in waves.