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Stroda, Aaron

University of British Columbia

Understanding the behaviour of liquified natural gas is critical to appropriately designing the next generation of storage tanks used in industries ranging from industrial to personal transport, large scale storage, and distribution infrastructure. Simulation tools are an important part of this design process and having the right tool to use in these situations is critical for this projects' industry partner Westport Fuel Systems®. This thesis looks at the issue of simulation tools from the view of computational fluid dynamics via two related sub-studies. The first study examines the simulation of sloshing and vibrating LNG undergoing heat transfer within a Westport Fuel Systems® medium-sized on-truck fuel tank undergoing motion that is representative of a truck operating in an urban environment. The second study develops a method to simulate multiple miscible components of LNG simultaneously within a volume of fluid framework in order to simulate layering and compositional exchanges that occur in real LNG mixtures within a 3D domain. Both studies are conducted using OpenFOAM®, an open-source CFD library. In the first sub-study, adequate performance is achieved during sloshing trials in the Westport Fuel Systems® tank and it is concluded that, the effect of vibrations must not be ignored for modeling the storage of LNG in on-truck tank applications and that compressibleInterFoam is an acceptable solver for further development under these operating conditions. In the second sub-study, promising results and validations are shown using Fick's law of diffusion for a ternary component system where each component is tracked individually. As a relatively simple and cost-effective approach to modeling multicomponent miscible mixtures, it shows promise for use in modeling behaviour of LNG.

Text

2024-05-22

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88346

Mechanical Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/