Numerical Investigation of Liquid Sloshing in Carrier Ship Fuel Tanks

Abstract Liquid sloshing inside a partially filled tank has a great impact on the fragile internal tank coating and also on the stability of carrier ships. Several studies highlighted the challenges encountered due to the sloshing and proposed anti-sloshing tank structures. However, sloshing of liquefied natural gas fuel in high pressure vessels during transportation still remain a challenge. In the present numerical study we consider a downscaled 2D geometry to investigate the sloshing. Non-dimensional numbers are used to downscale the geometry. The purpose is to understand the flow structures and validate the downscaling approach based on the similarity scale laws. In the present work, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) based on the Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes equations (RANS) with the Volume of Fluid (VOF) method in one hand and the Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method in the other hand, are used to simulate the downscaled model. The results from both methods are compared and validated using experimental data. A full scale model have also been simulated using SPH to verify the applicability of the scaling laws. The SPH model shows the capability to efficiently capture the sloshing phenomena. The VOF and SPH provide similar results in terms of flow dynamics, pressure and forces. The overall numerical results agree with the measurements and show that SPH can be an efficient tool to be used in modelling sloshing phenomena, compared to the RANS-VOF approach which is expensive in terms of CPU time. However, features like turbulence need to be further investigated.