The temperature rises hydrogen tanks during the fast-filling process could threaten the safety of the hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. In this paper, a 2D axisymmetric model of a type III hydrogen for the bus was built to investigate the temperature evolution during the fast-filling process. A test rig was carried out to validate the numerical model with air. It was found significant temperature rise occurred during the filling process, despite the temperature of the filling air being cooled down due to the throttling effect. After verification, the 2D model of the hydrogen tank was employed to study the temperature distribution and evolution of hydrogen during the fast-filling process. Thermal stratification was observed along the axial direction of the tank. Then, the effects of filling parameters were examined, and a formula was fitted to predict the final temperature based on the simulated results. At last, an effort was paid on trying the improve the temperature distribution by increasing the injector length of the hydrogen tank. The results showed the maximal temperature and mass averaged temperature decreased by 2 K and 3.4 K with the length of the injector increased from 50 mm to 250 mm.

The severe vibration of a screw compressor outlet piping system caused the premature failures of some thermowells and the unplanned shut down of the compressor system. The root causes of the vibration problem were investigated by numerical simulations. An acoustic model was established to predict the pressure pulsation of the gas inside the pipelines, and two finite element models were built to study the vibration characteristics of the overall piping system and of the thermowells. The numerical results indicated that the vibration problem may be attributed to the excessive pressure nonuniformity of the gas inside the pipelines, low overall stiffness of the piping system and the first-order structural resonance occurred on the thermowells. A pulsation attenuator was added and the pipelines were rearranged to reduce the pressure pulsation, some pipe supports were added to improve the overall stiffness of the piping system, and the thermowells were reinforced to avoid the first-order structural resonance. After the modifications, the field measurement data showed that the vibration of the piping system decreased significantly, and the modified piping system has been operating normally for nearly two years.

This paper presents a transient computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of a reciprocating compressor to study the interaction of the thermodynamic process and pressure pulsation. To realize the interaction between the thermodynamics and the pressure pulsation, the most difficult procedure lies in dealing with the valve motion and flow through the valve channel both precisely and effectively. Therefore, a discretization method for the flow channel of the ring valve to generate structured grids is proposed. Then, the subsequent model is embedded in the flow channel of the compressor model. User-defined functions are employed to calculate the independent velocity of each valve plate based on the real-time pressure differences across the valve plates. After verified, the influences of the discharge pipeline configuration, pressure ratio, and rotational speed were examined. The results of the numerical model agreed well with the experiment. The maximal deviation between predictions and experiments at the pressure ratio of 3 was 6.14% of indicated power. The maximum deviation increased to 7.42% at the rotational speed of 480 rpm. The results for the discharge pipeline configuration verified that the buffer tank directly following the nozzle of the compressor contributed greatly to attenuating the pressure pulsation. A fast Fourier transform analysis of pressure pulsation showed that at all speeds, the amplitudes were almost the same below the eighth harmonic, and then gradually increased for the higher harmonics.