Radiation: Solar Effect on a Gasoline Tank

What You'll Build

This lesson walks you through 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.

What You'll Learn

• How solar radiation transfers heat to surfaces and objects, and why it matters for fuel storage safety

• How to design a 3-D cylindrical gasoline tank inside an external flow domain in Design Modeler

• How to generate an unstructured mesh (~1,084,362 cells) in ANSYS Meshing

• How to set up the P1 radiation model — and why it's well suited to this case (low CPU cost, handles scattering and optically thick media)

• How to activate solar ray tracing and the Solar Load model to apply realistic thermal loading from the sun

• How to define realistic solar calculator inputs: longitude (36.2605°), latitude (59.6168°), time zone (4.5), and a specific date and time (13:08, day 17, month 8)

• How to apply external-flow boundary conditions (air at 10 m/s, 318.15 K) striking the tank

• How to run a two-geometry comparison: bare tank vs. tank with a 0.003 m coating layer

• How to post-process 2-D and 3-D temperature contours at the final time step to show how the coating acts as a radiation barrier, keeping the gasoline cool

Why It Matters

Solar radiation modeling is essential for fuel storage, building thermal loads, solar collectors, and vehicle cabins. The P1 + Solar Load workflow you build here transfers directly to any design where sunlight drives the thermal behavior.