Study of the effect of baffles on longitudinal stability of partly filled fuel tanker semi-trailer using CFD

Abstract

Sloshing of liquid in partially filled fuel tanker vehicles has a strong effect on the directional stability and safety performance. Under the maneuver of the vehicle, such as steering, braking, or accelerating, the liquid fuel in the tanker tends to oscillate. As a result, hydrodynamic forces and moments raise. It leads to reduce the stability limit and the controllability of the vehicle. To minimize the effect of sloshing, the baffles are usually added to the tanker. This paper presents the study of the effect of baffles on the longitudinal stability of the fuel tanker semi-trailer using the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach. A three-dimensional fluid dynamic model of a typical tanker with different baffle configurations is developed. The User Defined Function (UDF) is used to control the acceleration of the tanker according to the simulation scheme. Transient simulations are performed for the cases of constant acceleration longitudinal maneuvers with different levels of fuel in the tanker. The volume of fluid (VOF) and air obtained from the simulation is used to indirectly calculate the center of gravity of the tanker. The post-processing results show that the baffles could provide resistance to the fluid sloshing, resulting in an improvement of the longitudinal stability of the tanker semi-trailer. The results also prove that the benefit of the baffle to the fuel tanker vehicle’s stability depends on the size of the baffle, as well as the number of baffles. The 40% height three baffles model is the proper baffle model to resist the longitudinal sloshing in the partially filled tanker of the studied trailer. By adding baffles, shifting of load on the kingpin and the rear axis are less than 5% and 2% as the tanker is filled with 50% and 70% fluid level respectively.