Input Shaping for Control of Liquid Sloshing

Liquid sloshing occurs when a partially filled liquid tank is subjected to undesirable external forces or acceleration/deceleration for positioning control. Installation of baffles is still the most popular way to suppress the sloshing, but recent successes of input shaping in reducing structural vibrations may give a possible alternative. We aim at investigating the applicability of input shaping to sloshing suppression by numerically solving fluid motions in a rectangular tank. The tank is partially filled with water and it is suddenly put into a sequence of horizontal motions of acceleration and constant speed. The flow is assumed to be two-dimensional, incompressible, and in viscid, and a VOF two-phase model is used to capture the free surface. Results show that the sloshing can be successfully suppressed by shaping the input, i.e., the velocity or acceleration profile of tank. Three different input shapers (ZII, ZVD, and two-mode convolved ZV shapers) are tested and compared in this study Among them, the convolved ZV shaper shows a best performance to eliminate the sloshing almost completely.