Liquid Sloshing Analysis For Independent Tank With Elastic Supports

As the natural gas is widely used as a clean and efficient energy source around the world, the need for the transportation and storage of the gas arises, various LNG carriers and offshore floating LNG plant concepts have aroused wide concern. As the supports of the independent tank belong to elastic structure compared with the rigid boundary of the tank wall, the motion of the independent tank should be regarded as a dynamic problem considering the coupled effect of the elastic support function and tank sloshing loads.The sloshing characteristics are investigated in the independent tank with elastic supports. A 2D coupled algorithm involving the Hilber-HughesTaylor implicit method for the tank motion and the VOF method for the fluid is proposed. By applied into the experiment designed for the TLD, the algorithm is validated to be applicable to the coupled issue between tank motion and liquid sloshing. By conducting coupled calculation and comparing the numerical results with those obtained by ignoring the elastic impact, obvious differences of the tank motion and liquid sloshing are found between the two models. The stiffness of elastic support has a significant impact on the sloshing load. Precisely, with the increase of the stiffness, the sloshing load keeps growing dramatically and reaches its peak at the resonant point, before dropping continually and eventually leveling off to a constant value, which is coincident with the sloshing load without considering the elastic influence. By conducting coupled calculation of the Independent Type B tank with different fill ratios, the sloshing load is analyzed, which is found to be slightly larger than those ignoring the elastic impact.An efficient and effective method is finally presented for forecasting the sloshing load of independent tank with elastic supports.