Dynamic coupling between shallow-water sloshing and horizontal vehicle motion

Abstract

The coupled motion between shallow-water sloshing in a moving vehicle and the vehicle dynamics is considered, with the vehicle dynamics restricted to horizontal motion. The paper is motivated by Cooker's experiments and theory for water waves in a suspended container. A new derivation of the coupled problem in the Eulerian fluid representation is given. However, it is found that transformation to a Lagrangian representation leads to a formulation which has nice properties for numerical simulation. In the Lagrangian representation, a simple and fast numerical algorithm with excellent energy conservation over long times, based on the Störmer–Verlet method, is implemented. Numerical simulations of the coupled dynamics in both the linear and non-linear case are presented.