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.
Study on thermal insulation of liquefied natural gas cryogenic road tanker