J. Marine Sci. Appl.

(2012) 11: 305-310

DOI: 10.1007/s11804-012-1137-y

A Numerical Study of Liquid Sloshing in

a Two-dimensional Tank under External Excitations
Ling Hou1*, Fangcheng Li1 and Chunliang Wu2
1. Engineering College, Guangdong Ocean University, Zhanjiang 524088, China
2. Cain Department of Chemical Engineering, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge LA 70803, United States
Abstract: In this research, liquid sloshing behavior in a 2-D rectangular tank was simulated using
ANSYS-FLUENT software subject to single or multiple-coupled external excitations (such as sway coupled
with roll, and sway and roll coupled with heave). The volume of fluid (VOF) method was used to track the free
surface of sloshing. External excitation was imposed through the motion of the tank by using the dynamic mesh
technique. The study shows that if the tank is subjected to multiple coupled excitations and resonant excitation
frequencies, liquid sloshing will become violent and sloshing loads, including impact on the top wall, will be
intensified.
Keywords: liquid sloshing; multiple coupled excitations; computational fluid dynamics (CFD); dynamic mesh
technique
Article ID: 1671-9433(2012)03-0305-06

1 Introduction1
Liquids in partially filled tanks tend to slosh when subject to
external perturbations. If the perturbations are small, the
sloshing can be considered as a linear superposition of waves
of different components. The load experienced by the tank as
a result of sloshing appears to be periodic if the external
forcing is periodic (Liu, 2009). It is of great practical
significance to study liquid sloshing in coastal and offshore
engineering since it concerns the safety of waterway
transportation of oil and liquefied natural gases. The impulse
from sloshing on the tank can be large and may cause damage
to the tank due to the interaction of non-linear waves, a large
external excitation amplitude, or oscillations near the intrinsic
frequency of sloshing (Qi, 2008). Such situations are usually
encountered in waterway transportation of liquids.
Sloshing waves have been investigated for several decades. A
comprehensive review on this topic can be found in research
literature (Lu et al., 2008; Ibrahim et al., 2001; Ibrahim, 2005;
Lin, 2008). Many studies focused on theoretical and linear
solutions of sloshing waves based on potential flow
assumption (Faltinsen, 1978; Faltinsen et al., 2000; Faltinsen
et al., 2001; Hill, 2003). Although theoretical studies have
gained significant insight into liquid sloshing, they are known
to be silent on the topic of wave overturning and breaking in
the case of violent liquid sloshing where the liquid viscosity
and flow turbulence cannot be ignored. In this regard,
numerical simulation and analysis have become an important
alternative approach in liquid sloshing studies in recent years.
Received date: 2012-03-24.
Foundation item: Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of
China under Grant No.30770394.
Harbin Engineering University and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012

It is straightforward to apply the viscous flow theory in

numerical simulations. The mature techniques developed in
the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) research community
and the enriched models and modeling practices for complex
turbulent flows over the past few decades have greatly
increased the accuracy and reliability of numerical studies on
liquid sloshing. Not only can CFD modeling approaches
overcome potential flow limitations in theoretical studies, but
they are also capable of handling complicated boundaries
often encountered in reality. It is necessary to compare the
simulation results with experimental measurement or
theoretical solutions and thus validate the CFD model before
it is extrapolated to general case analysis.
A lot of work has been done in the application of CFD to
liquid sloshing. For example, Sriram et al. (2006) analyzed
the behavior of the sloshing waves in a tank subjected to
excitation in the horizontal and vertical directions using a
finite element scheme. Their research showed that the peaks
appear at the natural frequencies of the system and the peak
magnitude is close to the natural frequency for the sway
excitation regardless of peak excitation frequency.
Furthermore, when the excitation frequency is equal to the
first mode of natural frequency for the resonance condition,
its consequence is a higher magnitude. In addition, for the
heave excitation, irrespective of whether peaks appear at the
natural frequencies, the magnitude of the spectral peak is the
same for different excitation frequencies. Some other relevant
studies also can be found in research literature (Armenio et al.,
1996; Rhee, 2005; Yu et al., 2008).
In this work, the CFD method is used to investigate the liquid
sloshing behaviors in a rectangular tank which is subjected to
single or multiple-coupled external excitations. The

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Ling Hou, et al. A Numerical Study of Liquid Sloshing in a Two-dimensional Tank under External Excitations

multiple-coupled external excitations mean that different

external excitations are imposed on the tank at the same
time. These excitations are given through the CFD dynamic
mesh technique, which was implemented by FLUENT
user-defined functions. The volume of fluid (VOF) method is
used to track the free surface of sloshing. The external
excitation is imposed through the motion of the tank by using
the dynamic mesh technique. The paper is organized into the
following sections. First, the governing equations are briefly
introduced followed by a section on the parameter settings
applied in the numerical simulations. Subsequently, the
modeling approach is validated for a case with a single
excitation source. Finally, the impulse loads under multiple
excitations, such as sway coupled with roll, and sway and roll
coupled with heave, are analyzed. The variations of the free
surfaces captured by the numerical method are discussed as
well.

The standard k-epsilon model is used for turbulence

modulation.

3 Numerical implementation
3.1 Geometric model
The computation domain used in this study is illustrated in
Fig. 1 (Bernhard et al., 2009). The 2-D rectangular tank has a
length of 1.2 m and height of 0.6 m. The depth of the static
water is 60% of the tank height. During computation the
pressure is monitored at the four points on the right wall of the
tank in order to record the sloshing loads. The domain is
discretized into 12060 uniform structured computational
grids.

2 Mathematical model
The volume of fluid (VOF) method is adopted to capture the
free surface motion of sloshing in a liquid tank. The VOF
method uses a characteristic function F to capture the fluid
volume and identify the free surface position. F is defined as a
step function which represents the volume fraction of a cell
filled with liquid:

1
fluid

Fx, y, t=
(1)
0 ~ 1 free surface

empty

0
F=0 or F=1 means the cell away from the interface is fully
filled with air or liquid; while 0< F <1 means the cell is partly
filled with liquid and identifies the position of the free surface.

The advection equation for F is

d F F
(2)
=
+ (u ) F = 0
dt
t
where u is the velocity, the normal direction of the free
surface can be obtained by calculating the gradient of F. The
free surface position can be determined approximately by the
piecewise linear scheme of geometric reconstruction.
The sloshing behavior in a liquid tank which can be
represented by an incompressible viscous fluid flow with a
free surface is governed by the Navier-Stokes equation and
the continuity equation
u

+ (uu) = - 1 p + m (u + uT ) + r g + F
t
r

(3)
r

u = 0

where u is the velocity, p the pressure, the density,

g the acceleration of gravity, F a body force, and the

viscosity of the mixture.

The Reynolds number of the liquid sloshing flow studied in
the present work is above 3.5E5. Thus the flow is turbulent.

Fig. 1 The sketch of 2-D sloshing simulation (all dimensions

in m)

3.2 External excitations

According to the linear theory of liquid sloshing, the modes of
liquid sloshing corresponding to various immersion ratios can
be obtained. The immersion ratio is defined as the ratio of the
height to the length of the liquid level in a tank. For a 2-D
rectangular tank, the lowest natural frequency of sloshing
fluid in the tank can be computed by the following formula:
1 ng tanh(na / b)
(4)
2
b
where f is the frequency, a the liquid depth, b the width of
the tank, g the gravitational acceleration, and n the order.
First-order (n=1) is usually adequate for the simulation.
fn =

The external perturbations of the tank include sway by which

the tank translates horizontally, roll by which the tank rotates
around a fixed axis across the bottom center of the tank, and
heave by which the tank translates in a vertical direction. If
these perturbations are periodic, they can be represented as
shown:
x = x0 cos(t )
sway

= q cos(t )
roll
0

y = y0 cos(t )
heave

where x is the horizontal translational velocity, x0 the

horizontal displacement amplitude, 2f n the angular

Journal of Marine Science and Application (2012) 11: 305-310

frequency, the angular velocity, q0 the amplitude of

angular displacement, y the vertical translational velocity,
and y0 the corresponding displacement amplitude.
3.3 Numerical methods
The commercial CFD code ANSYS-FLUENT is used for all
the simulations presented in this work. The pressure-velocity
equations are decoupled by the PRESTO! algorithm. The
transport equation for the volume fraction is solved by the
explicit time-marching scheme. The interface is constructed
by the piecewise linear scheme; thus, the convective flux
across the interface is computed. The convergence criterion is
that the residuals for all governing equations are below 1.0E-5.
The time step is 0.005 s. The boundaries of the tank are set as
non-slip walls, and the wave tank is initially static. Several
user defined functions are plugged into the CFD code and
work with the CFD dynamic mesh model to implement the
motions of the tank under the periodic external excitations.
The reader can find more details about the dynamic mesh
technology in the ANSYS-FLUENT users guide.

4 Results and discussions

4.1 Load cases
The first order natural frequency of sloshing for the liquid
tank computed by Eq.(4) reads as

1 g tanh(a / b)
= 0.692 Hz
2
b
In this work, numerical simulations with 6 load cases which
are combinations of two different frequencies and three
different excitation approaches are performed. The
parameters of the load cases are listed in Tables 12. Cases
13 have the same excitation frequencywhich is equal to
1.03 times the natural frequency of sloshing, but have
different excitation implementations. Cases 46 correspond
to cases 13 but the excitation frequency is set to the natural
frequency.

307

Table 2 Case parameters for external excitations (f=f1,

immersion ratio=0.6)
Maximum amplitude
of displacement

No.

The type of excitation

Case 4

Sway/m

0.015

Sway/m

0.015

Roll/rad

0.07

Case 5

Case 6

Sway/m

0.015

Roll/rad

0.07

Heave

0.06

4.2 Model validation

Fig. 2 depicts the pressure history at P2 when the tank is
only under sway and compares the numerical results to the
experimental data. Where the experimental data (Bernhard
et al., 2009) is expressed to dashed line and numerical
results is solid line. The results of the numerical simulation
are higher than the experimental data by up to 6.7% and this
small error can be allowed because of the numerical
discretization. In addition, the periodic variation of the two
pressure curves is similar in 5 oscillation cycles. In summary,
the observations from Fig. 1 show that the numerical
simulation matches the experiment data and it is feasible to
adopt the numerical model for this study.

f1 =

The parameters in Case 1 are selected to match the

experimental setup (Bernhard et al., 2009) in order to
validate the numerical model.
Table 1 Case parameters for external excitations (f =1.03f1,
immersion ratio=0.6)
Maximum amplitude
of displacement

No.

The type of excitation

Case 1

Sway/m

0.015

Sway/m

0.015

Roll/rad

0.07

Case 2

Case 3

Sway/m

0.015

Roll/rad

0.07

Heave

0.06

Fig. 2 Pressure history at P2 between oscillation 2025

4.3 Results analysis

Fig. 3 depicts numerical results of the pressure history at
P1P4 when the tank is under the excitation of sway, sway
coupled with roll, and sway coupled with roll and heave
when f=1.03f1. Where the results of Case 1 is expressed as
solid line, and Case 2 is dash-dot line, and Case 3 is
dash-dot-dot line (the figures below are also the same, it will
not be repeated). The analysis of the results in Fig. 3 can be
expressed as following:
1) View from the peak in the oscillation curve of sloshing
loads: when the tank is subjected to the excitation of
coupled sway-roll-heave, the wall pressure of the tank is the
largest of the three; and the wall pressure is the smallest of
the three when the liquid of the tank sloshes under single
sway excitation. Apparently, the more coupled the
excitations that a liquid tank is subjected to, the larger the
sloshing loads acting on the wall of the tank.
2) View from the phase angle for the oscillation curve of
sloshing loads: when the tank is subject to the excitation of
coupled sway-roll-heave, the pressure peak is ahead of the

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Ling Hou, et al. A Numerical Study of Liquid Sloshing in a Two-dimensional Tank under External Excitations

other two of the three; the pressure peak of the tank under
single sway excitation is also the last to be seen of the three.
3) View from the periodic oscillation curve: no violent
sloshing impacts on the top wall of the tank (Fig. 3(d)); this
will occur when the liquid level is high and the tank is under
periodic excitation. This will be explored in later analysis.

the first two observations on Fig. 3 can be extended to Fig. 4.

In addition, the following can also be observed:
Under the multiple coupled excitation (coupled sway-roll, or
coupled sway-roll-heave), when the frequency of the
excitation is close to the natural frequency of sloshing, the
liquid sloshing in the tank is violent and the sloshing loads
are larger than the condition of enharmonic frequency on the
top wall of the tank as shown in Fig. 4(d) and Fig. 3(d).

(a) Pressure history at positions P1

(a) Pressure history at positions P1

(b) Pressure history at positions P2

(b) Pressure history at positions P2

(c) Pressure history at positions P3

(c) Pressure history at positions P3

(d) Pressure history at positions P4

Fig. 3 Numerical results of pressure history at different

monitor points between oscillations 15-18 for Case
13 (f=1.03f1, time step=0.005 s)

Fig. 4 depicts numerical results of pressure history at P1P4

of the tank under the excitation of sway, coupled sway-roll,
and coupled sway-roll-heave while f = f1. Analysis similar to

(d) Pressure history at positions P4

Fig. 4 Numerical results of pressure history at different

monitor points between oscillations 15-18 for Case
46 (f=f1, time step=0.005 s)

Journal of Marine Science and Application (2012) 11: 305-310

309

Fig. 5(a)Fig. 5(d) depict the position of the free surface

under the excitation of coupled sway-roll-heave at different
times while f=1.03f1 (Case 3); for ease of observation, the
pressure history at P3 is presented separately in Fig. 5(e). It
can be seen that it shows certain linear characteristics and no
impact on the top wall during liquid sloshing of the tank
when the sloshing frequency is non-harmonic even though
the excitations are multiple coupled.
(a) Position of free surface at t = 21.859 s

(a) Position of free surface at t = 21.754 s

(b) Position of free surface at t = 22.454 s

(c) Position of free surface at t = 23.159 s

(b) Position of free surface at t = 22.524 s

(c) Position of free surface at t = 23.184 s

(d) Position of free surface at t = 23.959 s

(d) Position of free surface at t = 23.859 s

(e) Pressure history at the position of P4 for Case 6 when f=f1, time
step= 0.005 s

Fig. 6 The position of the free surface at different times and

the pressure history for Case 6

(e) Pressure history at the position of P3 for Case 3 when f=1.03f1, time
step= 0.005 s

Fig. 5 The position of the free surface at different times and

the numerical results of pressure history for Case 3

Fig. 6(a)Fig. 6(d) depict the position of the free surface

under the excitation of coupled sway-roll-heave at different
times while f=f1 (Case 6); for ease of observation, the
pressure history at P4 is presented separately in Fig. 6(e).
Comparing Fig. 5 with Fig. 6, it is observed that liquid
sloshing of the tank shows significant nonlinear

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Ling Hou, et al. A Numerical Study of Liquid Sloshing in a Two-dimensional Tank under External Excitations

characteristics. As a result of the harmonic frequency and

the multiple coupled excitations, other phenomena such as
overturning, breaking of waves, and violent impact on the
top wall during liquid sloshing are also observed. The
sloshing therefore becomes complicated.
4.4 Discussion
From the above information, it can be seen that sloshing
loads will be increased if the number of coupled excitations
is added. Moreover, liquid sloshing will become violent and
exhibit overturning, breaking waves, and violent impact on
the top wall if a tank is subjected to coupled excitations and
the excitation frequency is resonant. It can be predicted that
the larger the amplitude of sloshing, the more complicated
the coupled excitations, and the greater the complexity of
the mechanism of liquid sloshing. In addition, the combined
effect of the actual marine environment and the mechanism
of ship motion further complicate liquid sloshing in the tank
of a moving ship. So, it is particularly necessary to study the
mechanism of liquid sloshing of a tank under multiple
coupled excitations.

5 Conclusions
The liquid sloshing of a 2-D tank under single excitation
(sway), and multiple coupled excitations (coupled sway-roll
and coupled sway-roll-heave) have been studied numerically.
The study shows that liquid sloshing will be violent and
sloshing loads intensified, especially with respect to its
impact on the top wall while the sloshing tank is under
multiple coupled excitations and the excitation frequency is
resonant.
It is necessary to carry out more investigations such as
liquid sloshing of a 2-D tank under more complex multiple
coupled excitations, the mechanism of liquid sloshing for
larger sloshing amplitude, and the liquid sloshing under
different immersion ratios on the basis of the
above-mentioned two conditions. Also, the analysis should
be extended from 2-D to 3-D situation.

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Ling Hou was born in 1985. She is a teacher at
Engineering College of Guangdong Ocean
University. Her current research interests include
ship hydrodynamics.

Chunliang Wu is a post-doctoral research fellow

at Louisiana State University. He got his PhD
degree in Engineering Mechanics from Sun Yat-sen
University in 2004 and worked as Associate
Professor at Guangdong Ocean University. He has
co-authored 3 books and 17 peer-reviewed journal
articles, which are internationally circulated in the
field of chemical engineering, environmental
engineering and fluid mechanics. His research
interest includes computational fluid dynamics of
multiphase flows and indoor/outdoor air quality
modeling.