Dynamic sloshing in a rectangular vessel with porous baffles

The damping efficiency of vertical porous baffles is investigated for a dynamically coupled fluid-vessel system. The system comprises of a two-dimensional vessel, with a rectangular cross-section, partially filled with fluid, undergoing rectilinear motions with porous baffles obstructing the fluid motion. The baffles pierce the surface of the fluid, thus the problem can be considered as separate fluid filled regions of the vessel, connected by infinitely thin porous baffles, at which transmission conditions based on Darcy’s law are applied. The fluid is assumed to be inviscid, incompressible and irrotational such that the flow in each region is governed by a velocity potential. The application of Darcy’s law at the baffles is significant as it makes the system non-conservative, and thus the resulting characteristic equation for the normal modes leads to damped modes coupled to the moving vessel. Numerical evaluations of the characteristic equation show that the lowest frequency mode typically has the smallest decay rate, and hence will persist longest in an experimental setup. The maximum decay rate of the lowest frequency mode occurs when the baffles split the vessel into identically sized regions.