Study on thermal insulation of liquefied natural gas cryogenic road tanker

Abstract

The tanks designed for liquefied natural gas transport must be thermally insulated from the environment due to the low condensing temperature of the gas. The effectiveness of thermal insulation significantly affects the tank's operating parameters and its operating costs. As there is no perfect insulation, there is a need for analyses that would determine its suitability in specific applications. In this paper the issue of heat transfer through double-walled cryogenic tanks with evacuated insulation system was discussed. Afterwards the study of insulation variants of liquefied natural gas cryogenic road tanker was presented. The use of several layers of insulation made of modern and efficient materials such as aero-gel and fiberglass or the use of multi-layer isolation has been considered and compared to the use of perlite powder. The heat flux through insulation systems was tested for different variants of evacuated insulation under residual gas pressure of 10-1 Pa, 10-3 Pa, and 100 kPa. Finally, for selected insulation variants, the heat leakage was tested for 50 m3 liquefied natural gas road tanker. The investigation of heat-flow for the transient thermal analysis was performed by applying finite element method. The aim of the study was to determine the variant of insulation system with the relatively low heat leakage to the tank and low cost of materials and vacuum production.