Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to investigate different baffles on mitigating liquid sloshing in a rectangular tank due to a horizontal excitation and to find out the optimal selection of sloshing mitigation for practical applications. Design/methodology/approach -The numerical study is conducted by using a proven improved smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), which is convenient in tracking free surfaces and capable of obtaining smooth and correct pressure field. Findings -Liquid sloshing effects in a rectangular tank with vertical middle baffles, horizontal baffles, T-shape baffles and porous baffles are investigated together with those without any baffles. It is found that the existence of baffles can mitigate sloshing effects and the mitigation performance depends on the shape, structure and location of the baffles. Considering the balance of sloshing mitigation performance and the complexity in structure and design, the I shaped and T shaped baffles can be good choices to mitigate sloshing effects. Practical implications -The presented methodology and findings can be helpful in practical engineering applications, especially in ocean engineering and problems with large sloshing effects. Originality/value -The SPH method is a meshfree, Lagrangian particle method, and therefore it is an attractive approach for modeling liquid sloshing with material interfaces, free surfaces and moving boundaries. In most previous literature, only simple baffles are investigated. In this paper, more complicated baffles are investigated, which can be helpful in practical applications and engineering designs.

No abstract

Two-phase flow problems are presented using the method of smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH). The combination of meshless and lagrangian nature inherent in the SPH method offers the advantages in treating large deformations, large inhomogeneities and tracing interfaces in the two-phase flow process. Two cases are solved using a SPH code developed at ACES. It is found that major physics of the two-phase flow such as shape and location can be well captured in the simulation. Twophase SPH method presented in this paper can be easily extended to deal with many other problems of two-phase flow if simulation control parameters such as input condition, boundary condition and corresponding equation of state etc. are defined properly. Keywords -Meshless method; Numerical method; Smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH); Two-phase flow978-1-4244-3531-9/08/$25.00©2008 IEEE