Simplified Dynamic Analysis of Sloshing in Rectangular Tanks with Multiple Vertical Baffles

Sloshing is a well-known phenomenon in liquid storage tanks subjected to base or body motions. Up to now the use of multiple vertical baffles for reducing the sloshing effects in tanks subjected to earthquake has not been taken into consideration so much. On the other hand, although some of the existing computer programs are able to model sloshing phenomenon with acceptable accuracy, the full dynamic analysis subjected to random excitations, such as earthquake induced motions, is very time consuming. In this paper a method is presented for reducing the analysis duration based on first, conducting several dynamic analysis cases by using ANSYS-CFX for rectangular tanks of various dimensions, subjected to seismic excitations, and then, using neural network to create simple relationships between the dominant frequency and amplitude of the base excitations and the maximum level of liquid in the tank during the sloshing. The numerical modeling has been verified by using some existing experimental data, and several cases of time history analysis have been conducted to obtain the required numerical results for training a neural network. Finally, the predicted results of the neural network have been compared to those obtained by some other cases of analyses as control values.