VARIATIONAL BOUNDARY-ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF SMALL-AMPLITUDE FLUID OSCILLATION IN A LOW-GRAVITY ENVIRONMENT

A variational boundary element technique is developed to analyse the s mall-amplitude oscillation of an incompressible, inviscid fluid contai ned in a rigid tank of arbitrary geometry under low-gravity conditions . Due to the influence of surface tension, the fluid usually oscillate s about a curved free surface, which must first be determined by the s olution of a nonlinear equilibrium problem. All of the energy expressi ons for the linear vibration problem are derived in terms of the norma l displacement of the fluid boundary, which leads to a generalized eig enproblem. Numerical results are presented for several two- and three- dimensional evaluation problems; whenever possible, comparisons are ma de with known analytical solutions. The results indicate that the boun dary element technique is robust and accurate.