Coupled Multibody Dynamics and Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulation of Liquid Sloshing for Tanker Vehicles

The objective of this proposal is to develop a tool for time-accurate simulation of coupled CFD and multibody dynamics of tanker vehicles and sloshing liquid payloads, that includes integrated pre-processor, solver, and post-processor. The pre-processor allows constructing an object-oriented hierarchical "preliminary" model of the vehicle, tank, and terrain. The pre-processor includes a model tree editor along with interactive display of the model. It also includes an automatic mesh generator for generating the finite element (FE) model from the preliminary model. The FE model consists of hexahedral, beam, and truss solid elements, rigid bodies, joints, hexahedral incompressible fluid elements, and quadrilateral fluid-solid interface elements. The fluid mesh is modeled using a very light and compliant solid mesh which allows the fluid mesh to move/deform along with the tank using the ALE formulation. The fluid's free-surface is modeled using a mass conserving volume-of-fluid based algorithm. A parallel explicit-time integration solver is used to generate the coupled dynamic response of the vehicle, tank, and fluid. The post-processor allows near-photorealistic visualization of animations of: 1) liquid free-surface, iso-surfaces, vehicle, terrain and surroundings; 2) colored/contoured surfaces, 3) surface/volume arrows, 4) stream/streak/path-lines. Users can control the visualization using the tree editor or a clickable hierarchical list of natural-language commands.