LAUSR

Abstract The focus of the present study is on the efficacy of U-shaped containers used as liquid dampers in high-rise building system. An experimental study was undertaken with a U-shaped container to understand the liquid sloshing effect on the response control of tall buildings by conducting free, as well as forced vibration tests. The time history of the free surface motion was recorded using a video recording camera, and relevant data were captured. As carrying out experiments for different scenarios all the time is a difficult proposition, it was felt necessary to develop appropriate numerical models to understand the sloshing behaviour of the liquid contained in U-shaped containers. As an initial step towards it, both two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) numerical models are developed to observe the sloshing phenomenon of liquid stored in U-shaped containers. Using the volume of fluid (VOF) method, simulations are carried out on ANSYS (FLUENT) platform, which provides computational fluid dynamics (CFD) framework while solving the well-known Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations. Two equation turbulence model (k-epsilon) is used specially to examine the effects of turbulence on the numerical results. The numerical results thus obtained are matched with the experimental ones to demonstrate the applicability of the developed numerical model.