Sloshing induced damping in vertically vibrating systems

Abstract

All aircraft are subject to a range of loading throughout ground and flight operations, which ultimately define the sizing and weight of the aircraft structure. Active and passive loads alleviation technologies provide an approach to reduce dynamic loads arising from atmospheric gusts and turbulence, leading to more fuel-efficient aircraft designs. Within the H2020 SLOWD project, fuel sloshing is being considered as a method for alleviating loads in aircraft wings via an increase in effective damping. Recent work has considered the transient response of a vertically vibrating, single degree of freedom system coupled to a rectangular liquid-filled tank. This research revealed identifiable dissipation regions in the free vibration responses characterised by their own distinct equivalent damping ratio values. In this work, free surface displacement has been extracted from high-speed camera footage during the chosen sloshing regimes, which are representative of a decaying parametrically excited fluid. These results are compared against a fluid-structure coupled numerical model based upon smoothed particle hydrodynamics, previously shown to have good agreement with the experimental damping response. Further analysis of the free-surface response of the numerical solution notes a presence of an undesired travelling longitudinal wave. The analysis of this discrepancy between the model and experiment is then used to improve the numerical formulation, showing a requirement for modelling surface tension.