Radiation: Solar Effect on a Gasoline Tank

Solar Radiation Effect on a Gasoline Tank — ANSYS Fluent CFD Simulation

Description

This project presents a CFD simulation of solar radiation heating a gasoline tank — an important safety and storage problem, since overheating fuel raises vapor pressure and evaporation risk. Using ANSYS Fluent's radiation modeling, you'll capture how sunlight heats the tank and its contents, and how a protective coating can mitigate that effect. In this project, you'll model a cylindrical fuel tank in an external airflow and run a comparative study — with and without an insulating coating layer. As the opening project of the Radiation: Beginner CFD Training Package, it introduces the radiation and solar-load workflow on the simplest case — a single object under the sun — establishing the foundation the building and HVAC cases build on.

Methodology

The 3D cylindrical gasoline tank is designed inside an external flow domain in Design Modeler and meshed in ANSYS Meshing with an unstructured grid of roughly 1,084,362 cells. The P1 radiation model is set up — well suited to this case for its low CPU cost and its handling of scattering and optically thick media — and solar ray tracing and the Solar Load model are activated to apply realistic thermal loading from the sun. The solar calculator inputs are defined 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. External-flow boundary conditions are applied, with air at 10 m/s and 318.15 K striking the tank. The study is run as a two-geometry comparison: a bare tank versus a tank with a 0.003 m coating layer.

Analysis

Post-processing produces 2D and 3D temperature contours at the final time step, showing how the coating acts as a radiation barrier that keeps the gasoline cool. Comparing the bare and coated tanks quantifies how effectively the insulating layer reduces the solar heating of the fuel — directly relevant to storage safety. Solar radiation modeling is essential for fuel storage, building thermal loads, solar collectors, and vehicle cabins, and the P1 + Solar Load workflow built here transfers directly to any design where sunlight drives the thermal behavior. By the end of this project, you'll be able to set up the P1 radiation model, activate solar ray tracing and the Solar Load model with realistic solar-calculator inputs, run a comparative study of a protective coating, and interpret the temperature fields that show how solar radiation heats a fuel tank and how a coating mitigates it.