A review of numerical and experimental fluid sloshing mitigation techniques in elliptical tanks under dynamic braking conditions

The problem of liquid sloshing in partially filled tanks is a key safety and structural integrity issue in road transport, aerospace, maritime, and storage applications in industry. The sloshing literature is significantly underdeveloped in comparison to the well-studied canonical rectangular and cylindrical tank geometries, particularly in the case of elliptical cross-section tanks, which are commonly used in road tanker design, and are known for their low centre of gravity and favourable aerodynamic profile. This review is a systematic assessment of the sloshing mitigation methods studied using CFD tools for elliptical tanks in dynamic braking conditions. The results of the numerical, experimental, and optimisation studies are summarized. The governing physics are summarised, and the free surface is solved using the Volume-of-Fluid (VOF), Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH), and Arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian (ALE) methods (governing-equation and fluid-compressibility assumptions are detailed in Section 2.1). The effectiveness of baffle-based mitigation strategies is assessed with respect to their force attenuation, pressure distribution, and frequency-shifting capabilities. Surrogate-assisted and multi-objective optimisation methods such as Kriging metamodels and NSGA-II are discussed in terms of their ability to find Pareto-optimal baffle geometries for multiple design requirements. Five gaps are identified: elliptical geometries are not covered, longitudinal braking excitation shows too few examples, there are no quantitative vehicle-dynamics-relevant metrics, the scope of multi-objective optimisation is limited, and the assumption of idealized sinusoidal boundary conditions is excessive. The review then summarises possible future research directions for the coupling of high-fidelity CFD validation with realistic transient excitation inputs for elliptical tank systems.