Abstract: In this paper, based on the non inertial smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) which is a Lagrangian mesh less method, a numerical method regarding outlet boundary conditions is proposed to limit the flux at the outlet boundary, which is an extension of the methods proposed to the treatment of open boundary conditions based on the buffer layers. According to the spacecraft attitude information and liquid filled ratio at the current time, the SPH solver can calculate the sloshing force and moment exerted by variable mass liquid against the spacecraft during the dynamic time step. The SPH solver can be embedded in the closed loop dynamics simulation of the whole spacecraft. Finally, in order to verify the validity of the method, the results from the SPH method are compared with those obtained by a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software, Flow 3d for different sloshing cases.

Key words: Smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), Variable mass liquid, Large amplitude sloshing, Outlet boundary; Sloshing force and moment