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Simulation tools are becoming more and more popular in the automotive industry since they can significantly reduce the costs required for development of new models. Currently there are many computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools available on the market and becoming indispensable tools for R&D in many of the automotive applications. However there are some applications which require much effort by highly skilled engineers to prepare the model and impractical level of computation time even using a cluster computer using the conventional CFD tools due to the nature of physics and complexity of a geometry such like dip painting process. Therefore, corrosion protection engineers are striving to find an alternative solution. Another issue is that the main focus of those available CFD tools are problems occurring during the dip paint simulations and they omit problems occurring after the object dips out from the bath, such as retained water or bake drips.

Sloshing of a partially filled fuel tank subjected to braking is studied using uni-directional fluid structure interaction approach using commercial solvers, SC/Tetra and Abaqus. The simulation uses co-simulation engine from simulia which allows the data transfer between the two solvers smoothly without any need for additional programing or third party software. Two braking scenarios heavy and mild braking and two levels of filling in the tank, 53% full and 40 % full are considered in the study. In this study water was used instead of fuel. The study compares the force acting on the fuel tank and is found to have the same trend as the mechanism that triggers the sloshing. The study also compared the deformation of the node located on one of the two tank chambers and found that the deformation of a node on the tank did not change much for the given braking scenario with the changing water levels.