Design and Analysis of Fuel Tank Baffles to Reduce the Noise Generated From Fuel Sloshing

Fuel slosh inside an automotive fuel tank was found to generate unpleasant noise. This paper presents the analysis of several baffle designs to suppress the fuel slosh by using a commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics software, FLOW-3D^®, and performing slosh experiments. Estimated mean kinetic energy and average turbulent kinetic energy of the fluid obtained from the computer simulations were used to compare with sound measurements obtained from the slosh experiments. The slosh experiments were recorded using high speed video equipment enhanced with a data acquisition system to take sound measurements. The simulation results showed that approximately 70% energy reduction from the No-baffle configuration could be achieved with the best baffle configuration. The experimental results demonstrated that at low fluid level, the performance of different baffle configurations was approximately the same. At high fluid level, the best baffle configuration can reduce the sound level by approximately 15 decibels.