Numerical simulations of sloshing flows with an elastic baffle using a SPH-SPIM coupled method

Abstract

In this work, sloshing flows were successfully simulated by using a coupled numerical scheme between smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) and smoothed point interpolation method (S-PIM) (SPH-SPIM coupled method). SPH is a Lagrangian particle method to solve flow fields while S-PIM is developed to deal with the structure dynamics. A coupling scheme is proposed, the key of which is that the fluid and solid fields are not necessary to be discretized by the same resolution. The stability, accuracy, convergence and conservation of the SPH-SPIM coupled method were validated by the case of hydrostatic water column on an elastic plate. Then, a wave impact problem was simulated to verify that the present SPH method worked well for sloshing flows. Finally, two sloshing problems with an elastic baffle were simulated, which validated the accuracy and stability of the method in predicting the fluid-structure interaction (FSI) features during the process of sloshing. It has been found that both the shape of the free surface and the large deformation of the elastic baffle can be well captured by the present method, which shows the potential of the present method to be a good candidate for simulating sloshing problems.