Solar Radiation Effect on a Gasoline Tank

Solar Radiation Effect on a Gasoline Tank Simulation

Description

This project simulates the effect of solar radiation on a gasoline storage tank using ANSYS Fluent — an important safety and storage problem, since overheating fuel raises its vapor pressure and increases evaporation risk. The simulation captures how sunlight heats the tank and its contents, and how a protective coating layer can mitigate that effect.

The model consists of a cylindrical fuel tank placed inside an external airflow domain, and the study is comparative: the same case is run twice, once with a bare tank and once with an insulating coating layer, to quantify directly how the coating acts as a thermal barrier. Beyond fuel storage, the workflow developed here applies wherever sunlight drives thermal behavior — building heat loads, solar collectors, and vehicle cabins alike.

Methodology

The 3-D cylindrical gasoline tank and its surrounding external flow domain are designed in Design Modeler, and an unstructured mesh of 1,084,362 cells is generated in ANSYS Meshing. The comparative study uses two geometries: the bare tank, and the tank wrapped in a 0.003 m coating layer.

Radiation is modeled with the P1 radiation model — well suited to this case thanks to its low computational cost and its ability to handle scattering and optically thick media. Solar ray tracing and the Solar Load model are activated to apply realistic thermal loading from the sun, with the solar calculator configured for a specific location and time: longitude 36.2605°, latitude 59.6168°, time zone +4.5, at 13:08 on day 17 of month 8. The external flow boundary conditions define air striking the tank at 10 m/s with a temperature of 318.15 K.

Analysis

At the end of the solution process, 2-D and 3-D temperature contours at the final time step are extracted and compared between the two configurations. The results show how solar radiation heats the tank surface and raises the temperature of the gasoline inside — and how the coating layer interrupts that heat path, acting as a radiation barrier that keeps the stored fuel significantly cooler.

The comparison delivers a clear engineering conclusion: a thin insulating coating is an effective passive protection measure against solar heating of fuel storage, directly reducing vapor-pressure buildup and evaporation losses. By completing this project, you will learn to set up the P1 radiation model with solar ray tracing and the Solar Load calculator, define location- and time-specific solar inputs, combine external-flow convection with radiation loading, and run a two-geometry comparative study — a workflow that transfers directly to any design where sunlight governs the thermal response.