Efficacious slosh suppression technique in road tankers to enhance the effectiveness of drinking water distribution

During summer months, many parts of the world experience the water crisis and water tankers transport fresh drinking water from rivers and other reservoirs and distribute to communities often located at far off places. Effectiveness of this distribution is adversely affected by the instability of tankers due to the phenomenon called liquid sloshing, the oscillation of free liquid surface subjected to external excitation. The liquid within the tank moves along the side walls back and forth creating an oscillation which becomes dangerously worse at certain situations. Sloshing makes the tanker unstable when the operating frequency and the tanker frequency coincides which may even cause the tanker to roll over. Hence, quite often, the tankers have to be operated on roads only at its maximum capacity and the water left in the tank may have to be spilled and wasted if the storage facility at the destination is less than the tanker capacity. In this work we are proposing an optimum design of water tankers to minimize the effect of sloshing and thereby enabling trouble-free operation of the tankers even in partially filled conditions. Sloshing parameters such as slosh height and dynamic wall pressures are experimentally and numerically analyzed for various tank geometries with and without baffles. A numerical model for analyzing slosh parameters is also developed and validated using experimental results. Based on the study an optimized tanker configuration is proposed.