Macroscopic modelling for screens inside a tuned liquid damper using incompressible smoothed particle hydrodynamics

Abstract

Liquid sloshing inside a Tuned Liquid Damper (TLD) equipped with screens introduces significant numerical modelling challenges. A 2D Incompressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (ISPH) model employing a novel macroscopic screen model is presented to capture the complex flow associated with screens and significantly minimize the high computation cost of traditional microscopic screen models. The macroscopic screen model is based on Ergun's equation for pressure drop in porous media. The Sub-Particle Scale (SPS) turbulence model is added to the base code. The modified ISPH code is validated for a hydrostatic case and tank without screens scenario. The predicted sloshing forces and wave heights are validated against experimental data and are compared to numerical results of an existing macroscopic screen model. Findings indicate that the proposed model agrees with experimental results for different fluid depths and under a broad range of excitation amplitudes. The proposed macroscopic screen model and updated ISPH code can more accurately capture the response at small excitation amplitudes and requires less computation time than an existing macroscopic model. The proposed model can be an efficient tool for studying internal tank responses over various excitation amplitudes and frequencies without the need for experimental data to determine the drag coefficient for different screen geometries.