EnginSoft - CAE Conference Abstracts

EnginSoft International Conference 2011
CAE Technologies for Industry

Analysis of the Sloshing of a Large Tank with Design-basis and Fukushima-like Seismic Excitations

Magugliani Fabrizio - Ansaldo Nucleare (Italy)
Alemberti Alessandro - Ansaldo Nucleare (Italy)

Abstract

The problem of modeling the effects of liquid sloshing in moving or stationary containers remains of great concern to aerospace, civil, and nuclear engineers; physicists; designers of road tankers and ship tankers; and mathematicians. In this presentation, the effects of current design-basis seismic excitations (i.e. the seismic excitations used up to now for modeling the sloshing) and Fukushima-like seismic excitations (i.e. the seismic excitations measured at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Station, Japan) are modeled in a large, geometrically complex, stationary tank filled with water. CFX5 has been used to perform the analyses for both seismic excitations, and the overall model and results of CFX5 have been validated via comparing results with Fluent's on selected variables and surfaces. The main goals of the analyses have been a) determining the slosh loads (max and surface-averaged) on the walls, floor and roof of the tank, b) determining the flow field inside the tank at selected locations, c) assess of the amount of water leaving the tank via the openings located on the sides of the tank.
Overall, the results of the simulation show a good agreement with existing literature and scaled-down experiments.