Fully coupled analysis of ship motion and sloshing tank in waves is essential for floating structures which store and transports natural gas. For partially filled tanks would generate violent sloshing due to external wave excitation, and the sloshing flow can consequently affect ship motion. Therefore, how to evaluate ship motion and sloshing phenomenon in tank is of great importance, especially under real sea state, when wave induced sloshing would be more complex than that under linear wave condition.
In the present work, a CFD-based method is applied to simulate both external wave field and inner sloshing tank field in regular waves and irregular waves. The ship is a simplified FPSO, with two LNG tanks.
All the numerical simulations are carried out by the in-house CFD code naoe-FOAM-SJTU, which is developed on the open source platform OpenFOAM. The regular and irregular wave condition is simulated based on open source toolbox waves2Foam. The main parameters of coupling effect of ship motion and sloshing tank, such as the time history of ship motion, sloshing phenomenon in tanks are obtained by our computations. The predicted results for the coupling effects of ship motion and sloshing tank in regular waves are compared with the corresponding experimental data. The comparison is satisfactory and shows that the CFD method has the ability to simulate coupling effects of ship motion and sloshing tank in waves.
