Approach for the determination of heat transfer coefficients for filling process of pressure vessels with compressed gaseous media

Abstract

Paper presented at the 6th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, South Africa, 30 June - 2 July, 2008.

For fast and effective simulation of filling processes of pressure vessels with compressed gaseous media the governing equations are derived from a mass balance equation for the gas and from energy balance equations for the gas and the wall of the vessel. For simplicity the gas is considered as a perfectly mixed phase and two heat transfer coefficients are introduced. The first one is the mean heat transfer coefficient between the gas and the inner surface of the pressure vessel and the second one is the heat transfer coefficient between outer surface of the vessel and the surroundings. Although the process is transient, steady-state heat transfer coefficients for free convection are used between outer surface of the vessel and the surroundings. The use of available correlations for steady-state heat transfer coefficients to describe transient processes is common practice, e.g. in the modelling of the transient behaviour of heat exchangers [1]. But no correlations – neither steady-state nor transient – are available for the heat transfer coefficient between inflowing gas and inner surface of the vessel. To solve this problem a CFD tool is used to determine the gas velocities at the vicinity of the inner surface of the vessel for a number of discrete surface elements. The results of a large amount of numerical experiments show that there exists a unique relationship between the tangential fluid velocities at the vicinity of the inner surface of the vessel and the gas velocity at the inlet. Once this unique relationship is known the complete velocity distribution at the vicinity of the inner surface can be easily calculated from the inlet velocity of the gas. The nearwall velocities at the outer limit of the boundary layer are substituted into the heat transfer correlation for external flow over flat plates. The final heat transfer coefficient is the areaweighted mean of all local heat transfer coefficients. The method is applied to the special case of filling a 70 MPa composite vessel for fuel cell vehicles with hydrogen. Because of the heat capacity of the composite wall consisting of an inner aluminium liner wrapped with carbon fibre, heat transfer from the compressed gas to the vessel wall strongly influences the temperature field of the gas which is predicted by the model and confirmed by experiments.