Numerical Study of the Thermal Behavior on Fast Filling of Compressed Gaseous Hydrogen Tanks

Gas behavior during fast filling of a compressed gaseous hydrogen storage tank (Type 3, 35MPa) was simulated numerically to investigate in detail the resulting unsteady temperature distribution and its correlation with the storage tank conditions. The governing equations for the gas phase are the mass, momentum, and energy equations; these equations were discretized using the finite volume method (FVM) in three-dimensional space. The numerical results were carefully compared with the experiment results and have been validated. Consequently, the temperature distributions in space, the time histories of temperature at the measured points, and the filling time to the target pressure were all in good agreement. Furthermore, the unsteady gas and its thermal behavior were clearly visualized in three-dimensional space.