Thermal Validation and Design Study of Fast Filling of Hydrogen Tank
2022-01-0835
03/29/2022
- Event
- Content
- A key challenge to commercialization of fuel cell electric vehicles is to build a reliable, compact and cost-effective storage of hydrogen fuel in the vehicle. An important design consideration is to ensure that sufficient quantity of hydrogen is available without taking up excessive passenger or cargo space. In order to accomplish this, hydrogen is stored under high pressures to ensure that sufficient fuel is available for reasonable vehicle driving range. Other design aspects are the material choice of tank and tank liners, time for tank pressurization and maximum permissible temperatures. An accurate and validated simulation methodology is an excellent design tool that complements and adds considerable value to the design process that traditionally depended on hardware testing of the tank. In this article, we investigate an alternative approach to the hardware testing based design process by implementing a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation based methodology that has the potential to reduce the cost and time of the entire design process. In this investigation, we focus on the hydrogen tank filling process. Accordingly, the simulation was run for the entire duration of tank filling and results were compared with experimental data. Excellent agreement was observed with test data on different tank filling initial conditions such as initial pressure of the tank and different tank materials. The results show that the simulation process can accurately model the tank filling process under high-pressure conditions for hydrogen. Under such conditions, the gas deviates from ideal gas behavior and therefore equation of state for real gases were implemented and validated. Finally, material properties and tank thicknesses were altered and the effect of these changes on the temperature distribution were evaluated to assess whether the designs were improved.
- Citation
- Wang, J., kandasamy, S., Li, H., Zhou, Y. et al., "Thermal Validation and Design Study of Fast Filling of Hydrogen Tank ," SAE Technical Paper 2022-01-0835, 2022, .