Baffled fuel-storage container: parametric study on transient dynamic characteristics

In order to ensure the structural dynamic stability of moving liquid-storage containers, the flow motion of interior liquid should be appropriately suppressed by means of mechanical devices such as the disc-type elastic baffle. In practice, the design of a suitable baffle requires a priori the parametric dynamic characteristics of storage containers, with respect to the design parameters of baffle, such as the installation location and inner-hole size, the baffle number, and so on. In this paper, we intend to investigate the parametric effect of the baffle parameters on the transient dynamic behavior of a cylindrical fuel-storage tank in an abrupt vertical acceleration motion. For this goal, we employ the ALE (arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian) kinematic description method incorporated with the finite element method.