The long-period components in earthquake ground motions, which attenuate gradually with
distance, can induce sloshing waves in the liquid containment tanks although they are
located far away from the seismic source. The resulting sloshing waves generate additional
forces impacting the wall and roof of the tanks and may cause extensive damage on the tank
structure. Numerous examples of tank damages due to sloshing of fluid have been observed
during many earthquakes. Nevertheless, the effect of sloshing is usually primitively
considered in most of the seismic design codes of tanks. On the other hand, the derivation
of an analytical solution for the sloshing response of a liquid storage tank subjected to
harmonic excitation includes many assumptions and simplifications. Most of the analytical
solutions in the recent literature assumed the containing liquid to be invicid,
incompressible and irrotational, and the tank structure to be an isotropic elastic plate
with uniform stiffness, mass and thickness. Even though, experimental works are necessary
to study the actual behavior of the system, they are time consuming, very costly and
performed only for specific boundary and excitation conditions. However, appropriate
numerical simulation using fluid structure interaction techniques can be used to predict
the hydrodynamic forces due to the high-speed impacts of sloshing liquid on a tank wall
and roof. These simulations can reduce the number of experimental tests. The nonlinear
finite element techniques with either Lagrangian and/or Eulerian formulations may be
employed as a numerical method to model sloshing problems. But, most of the Lagrangian
formulations used to solve such problems have failed due to high mesh distortion of the
fluid. The arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian techniques are capable of keeping mesh integrity
during the motion of the tank. In this study, an explicit nonlinear finite element
analysis method with ALE algorithm is developed and sloshing phenomenon is analyzed. The
analysis capabilities of the method are explained on a technical level. Although, the
developed numerical procedure is applicable to deformable structures, the accuracy of the
method is validated with the existing analytical formulation derived from potential flow
theory as well as the experimental data carried out on rigid tanks when subjected to
harmonic and earthquake ground motions. High consistency between numerical and
experimental results in terms of peak level timing, shape and amplitude of sloshing waves
is obtained not only for non-resonant excitation but also for resonant frequency
motion.