Mitigation of liquid sloshing in a rectangular tank due to slotted porous screen

Abstract

Liquid sloshing inside a tank with a slotted porous screen at the center is studied based on numerical and experimental methods. Slotted screens with three different porosities (0.0964, 0.1968 and 0.3022) for two submergence depths of 1 and 2 cm have been considered. One of the main advantages of the slotted screens is that the resonance frequency of the sloshing tank can be altered and the sloshing-induced motion/load can be suppressed by energy dissipation across the porous screen. The complexities of slotted screens equipped in a sloshing tank are accompanied by wave breaking, jet formation and liquid fragmentations which are commonly seen phenomena across the porous screen. These violent free surface behaviors in a tank are studied based on numerical simulations using the incompressible turbulent model and compared with the experiments. For the numerical sloshing tank with porous screen, free surface elevation and pressure at the tank wall are in good agreement with the experimental results. The adopted numerical technique will be able to capture the nonlinear free surface wave profile, air entrapment and jet formation across the screen in agreement with the experiments. For the fully submerged screen, the lowest resonance period shifted slightly to higher values. The sloshing tank equipped with porous screen of 0.1968 for the fully submerged screen predicted lower values of the amplification factor and pressure at the tank wall compared to other cases.