Proceedings of the Thirty-second (2022) International Ocean and Polar Engineering Conference
Shanghai, China, June 5–10, 2022
Copyright © 2022 by the International Society of Offshore and Polar Engineers (ISOPE)
ISBN 978-1-880653-81-4; ISSN 1098-6189

www.isope.org

Study on Sloshing Pressure Distribution along Tank Wall
Chenyi Wang1, Changfang Zou1*, Jingchun Tang2, Quanming Miao1
1School of Ocean Engineering, Jiangsu Ocean University,Lianyungang, Jiangsu, China

2SDIC Jiangsu New Energy Co., Ltd.,Nanjing, Jiangsu, China

At present, the prediction and evaluation of sloshing impact load has
become a key point in the design of LNG-powered ships and liquidcarriers. A lot of research on pressure prediction of tank sloshing has
been carried out by model tests and numerical simulation in recent years.
Kim et al. (2005) compared the sloshing pressure of 2D and 3D
rectangular tanks by finite difference method, and found that the peaksloshing pressure of the 3D rectangular tank was higher than that of the2D rectangular tank. Delorme et al. (2009), Gao et al. (2011), Cai et al.
(2011), Pistani and Thiagarajan (2015) numerically and experimentallystudied the effects of different condition factors on sloshing pressure
characteristics. They discussed in detail the type of sloshing impact andthe characteristics of the time history curve of sloshing pressure. Zou etal. (2015) numerically studied the sloshing problems with boundary layergrid. The results showed that the liquid viscosity and compressible air
have effect on sloshing pressure, wave elevation and the rising time ofimpact pressure. They also used sloshing experiments to validate thenumerical results. Zou et al. (2015) and Jin et al. (2020) quantitatively
investigated the effects of liquid viscosity on sloshing pressure. They
found that the sloshing pressure reduces due to the energy dissipation
which caused by the viscous friction and the sloshing turned to a steadystate due to the action of viscous dissipation.

ABSTRACTTo clarify distribution characteristics of impact pressure induced bysloshing along the rectangular tank wall and predict the vertical position
where the maximum pressure appears, this paper uses VOF method anddynamic mesh technique to simulate the sloshing in the rectangular tankwith different conditions. The results show that the vertical position of
the maximum sloshing pressure decreases with the increase of the impact
strength when liquid does not impact the roof of the tank. The verticalposition of the maximum sloshing pressure decreases with the increaseof the rolling angle. The relationship between the vertical position of themaximum sloshing pressure and the excitation frequency presents
parabola-like characteristics and the parabola opens up, and theminimum of the vertical position occurs when the sloshing liquid near
the resonance state. It also shows that the maximum sloshing pressure
distributes regionally as the filling level changes.

KEY WORDS: Sloshing; Pressure distribution; Impact pressure; CFD;
Model test

INTRODUCTION

A large number of studies have been focused on the calculation ormeasurement of the sloshing pressure on the wall at the static free surface.
However, limited by experimental conditions such as size and number ofthe sensors, the researches on the sloshing pressure are rarely focused on
the entire wall. Therefore, the distribution of the sloshing pressure on thewall and its distribution characteristics are need more in-depth research.

Sloshing existing in widely engineering fields occurs in partial loadingtanks. The violent sloshing in the tank during medium and low loading
will have a certain effect on the movement and structural safety of thecarrier, especially for spacecraft, oil tankers and LNG carriers(Bouscasse et al., 2013). The GTT company in France requires that thefilling level of the thin film LNG vessel should not be in range of 10%
to 70% (Park et al., 2015). For marine structures, sloshing has potential
risks to the structural safety of the tank wall. Periodic impact sloshingload acting on tank wall is easy to cause fatigue damage, and on the other
hand, violent impact pressure is easy to cause structural damage whenliquid resonates in the tank (Jung et al., 2015). Therefore, it is very
important to study the characteristics of sloshing pressure for structuraldesign of the liquid tank.

Regarding of anti-sloshing methods, suppressing effect by adding abaffle in the tank was firstly studied by analyzing sloshing pressure on
the wall around the static free surface in 1966. Akyildiz and Unal (2004),
Panigrahy et al. (2009), Ünal et al. (2019) and Ma et al. (2021) studied
the anti-sloshing effect of the fixed baffles with different layouts. They
also analyzed anti-sloshing mechanism of the baffles. Yu et al. (2017)
designed a vertical baffle that can float at the free surface under any
working condition. By means of numerical calculations and model tests,

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