Predicting sloshing noise as early as possible during the design process has become an increasingly desired simulation for fuel tank suppliers as the demand for quieter vehicles increase. Simulating early on in the design process enables suppliers to build products directly to customer specifications, at a lower cost and shorter timeframe.
The procedure to accurately and efficiently analyze complete sloshing noise behavior has to date not been fully established. Current methods rely on indirect noise deduction based on specific positions from Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) analyses or uncoupled fluid analysis with separate structural and acoustic analyses.
In this paper, we introduce a technique to analyze the fully coupled sloshing noise generated in the fuel tank of an automobile. The technique takes advantage of combining an explicit coupled Lagrangian and Eulerian solver with an acoustics solver.
The advantage of a coupled Lagrangian and Eulerian solver to analyze the real fluid and structure interaction is taking into account the subtle or potentially positive influence that a deformable fuel tank structure will have on the fluid flow as well as providing the direct deformation used by the acoustic analysis to calculate the noise.
In order to apply this technique in practice, verification and validation of the linking procedure and overall process was performed and real life sloshing models were investigated. Validations of the simulation technique was performed on a number of well understood events in theory.