Investigation of Zero Moment Point in a Partially Filled Liquid Vessel Subjected to Roll Motion

Resumen

Liquid-handling robots are designed to dispense sub-microliter quantities of fluids for applications including laboratory tests. When larger amounts of liquids are involved, sloshing must be considered as a parameter affecting stability, which is of significance for autonomous vehicles. The measurement and quantification of slosh in enclosed volumes poses a challenge to researchers who have traditionally resorted to tracking the air?liquid interface for two-phase flow analysis. There is a need for a simpler method to predict rollover in these applications. In this work, a novel solution to address this problem is proposed in the form of the Zero Moment Point (ZMP) of a dynamic liquid region. Computational experiments of a partially filled, two-dimensional liquid vessel were carried out using the Volume of Fluid (VOF) method in a finite volume based open-source computational fluid dynamics solver. The movement of the air?liquid interface was tracked, while the Center of Mass and the resulting Zero Moment Point were determined from the numerical simulations at each time step. The computational model was validated by comparing the wall pressure and movement of the liquid-free surface to experimentally obtained values. It was concluded that for a dynamic liquid domain, the Zero Moment Point can be instrumental in determining the stability of partially filled containers subjected to sloshing.