Suppression of hydrodynamic sloshing in liquefied natural gas tank with floating baffle: Experimental and numerical studies

A fixed anti-sloshing mechanism such as baffles which modifies the tank structure may lead to increment of the maintenance cost. This paper proposes a floating baffle, and reviews its investigation on the sloshing behaviour in a membrane-type tank model under unidirectional excitation with 30% and 50% of filling ratio. An LNG tank was numerically simulated in OpenFOAM under regular sinusoidal motion with an amplitude of 3 cm and excitation frequency set to the natural frequency at 1.1 seconds. Impulsive pressure on the tank wall was obtained, and then benchmarked with the experimental results from the pressure sensors. The simulation and experiment results showed an acceptable agreement with a root mean squared error of less than 10%. The findings are expected to become a significant reference for safer sea transportations such as conventional LNG vessels.