Laboratory Simulation Studies on Evaporative Fuel Loss from Storage Tanks

¹ Department of Mechanical Engineering, Nitte Meenakshi Institute of Technology, Bangalore, India.
² Department of Biotechnology Engineering, NMAM Institute of Technology, NITTE (Deemed to be University), Nitte, India.
³ Department of Mechanical Engineering, Sri Venkateshwara College of Engineering, Bangalore, India.

^* Corresponding author: snehanayak@nitte.edu.in

Abstract

The fossil fuel is used for various activities; however, it is available in limited quantity and burning of fossil fuel causes global warming. The fuel loss from fuel tanks causes volatile organic emission. When two-wheeler is parked in hot sun during summer, there is evaporation loss of fuel from the fuel tanks. In this work, experimental work was carried out in laboratory, to understand fuel losses at various temperature such as 35, 40 and 45 degree C. From this work, it was observed that the air temperature significantly affects the fuel loss. The fuel loss increases with increase in air temperature and higher evaporation losses were observed at 45-degree C. To simulate the fuel storage tank with different level of fuel in the tank, experiments were conducted with beakers of different capacity such as 80, 100 and 200 mL which has the surface area of 101, 149 and 226 cm². From the experiments, it was observed that the fuel evaporation loss increases with increase in surface area of the beaker. The surface is of 226 cm² causes highest fuel evaporation loss as compared to other surface areas. From this work, we suggest that evaporative losses be minimized through appropriate mitigation measures.