Liquid propellant sloshing inside spacecraft tanks is of crucial importance to the dynamics of the space vehicle. The interaction of the disturbance forces and torques, caused by the moving fuel, with the solid body and the control system, might lead to an increase in the AOCS actuators commands, which can degrade the vehicle's pointing performances and, in critical cases, generate unstable attitude and orbit control. Thus, it is of major importance to accurately predict the behaviour of liquid propellants sloshing inside spacecraft tanks.This M.Sc. thesis is focused on this topic, being its major objective the implementation of a CFD software in an existing EADS Astrium simulation environment. The integrated simulation environment is used to assess the influence of liquid propellant sloshing for specific satellite missions.From a defined set of requirements an open source CFD software based on FEM is chosen - Elmer. The software is integrated and the final simulation environment is evaluated for sloshing purposes using three different sloshing test cases.The first two test cases deal with rectangular and cylindrical laterally excited tanks where comparators are available - the results of the tests are validated against numerical and experimental results.The final test case is defined to reduce the gap between the simple test cases performed to validate the software and the real sloshing problems faced in space vehicles. A typical liquid propellant tank is selected and real mission conditions are simulated. The liquid sloshing inside the laterally excited tank is deeply studied, being fully characterized. The simulation environment is validated for the implemented liquid sloshing problems. ; Validerat; 20131119 (global_studentproject_submitter)


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    Title :

    Implementation of a Computational Fluid Dynamics Code for Propellant Sloshing Analysis


    Contributors:

    Publication date :

    2013-01-01


    Type of media :

    Theses


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



    Classification :

    DDC:    624 / 629





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