Design Optimization of Enclosed Liquid Containers With Baffles for Sloshing and Impact
A multidisciplinary optimization method is presented to support the design process of partially-filled liquid containers subject to the disciplines of sloshing and impact analysis. This paper represents a part of a study on Multidisciplinary Design and Optimization of liquid containers, and shows experimental techniques used to try to better understand sloshing as a phenomenon and to evaluate the capabilities of the commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code in question. Experimental validation includes qualitative comparison of visual free-surface behavior and quantitative comparisons of pressure measurements in the time and frequency domain. The liquid motion exhibits good comparisons in time with some deviations in wave amplitude due to a modification of the low frequency content of the input signal to the CFD simulation. This modification was caused by both the experimental signal filtration process and deficiencies in the low-frequency measurement capability of the accelerometer. In the frequency domain the first two odd oscillatory modes are accurately captured. A candidate objective function for the quantitative evaluation of the sloshing phenomenon is proposed. Using the response surface method in LS-OPT, various single (sloshing or impact only) and multidisciplinary optimization formulations are presented and results are examined. As expected, the multidisciplinary optimum proved to be a compromise between the optima obtained when considering the two single disciplines independently.