CFD and Experimental Study of Refuelling and Venting a Fuel System

Sammanfattning: In 1999, California Air Resources Board (CARB) implemented a regulation that required all gasoline cars sold in California be fitted with an Onboard Refueling Vapor Recovery System (ORVR). The ORVR system is designed to prevent Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) from escaping into the atmosphere during refuelling by storing the gas vapours in a carbon canister. Due to the complex nature of the fuel system, making design changes could have large implications on the ORVR performance of the vehicle. It is therefore desirable to develop a CFD model that can predict the effects of design changes, thereby reducing the need to perform physical tests on each design iteration. This master thesis project was performed at the Fuel Systems department at Volvo Cars in order to help reduce project lead times and product development costs by incorporating CFD as a part of the fuel system development cycle. The CFD results obtained were validated through experimental tests that were also performed as part of this project. In this master thesis project, a CFD model was developed to simulate the refuelling of gasoline for a California specification Volvo XC90 with an OPW-11B pump pistol. The model was set up in STAR-CCM+ using the Eulerian Volume of Fluid model for multiphase flow, the RANS realizable k-epsilon turbulence model and the two layer all y+ wall treatment. The effects of the carbon canister were modelled as a porous baffle interface in the simulations where viscous and inertial resistances of the porous media were adjusted to obtain a desired pressure drop across the canister. This method proved to be a suitable simplification for this study. The effects of evaporation as well as a chemical adsorption model for the carbon canister have been excluded from the project due to time limitations. It was found that the CFD simulations were in good agreement with the experimental results, especially with respect to capturing the overall behaviour of the fuel system during refuelling. It was found that resolving the flow spatially (and temporally) in the filler pipe was a crucial part in ensuring solver stability. A pressure difference between experiment and simulation was also observed as a consequence of excluding evaporation from the CFD model. After the CFD model had been verified and validated, changes to different parts of the fuel system were investigated to observe their effects on ORVR performance. These included changing the recirculation line diameter, changing the carbon canister properties and changing the angle of how the pump pistol was inserted into the capless unit. It was found that the recirculation line diameter is a very sensitive design parameter and increasing the diameter would result in fuel vapour leaking back out into the atmosphere. Similarly, increasing the back pressure by swapping to a different carbon canister would result in the leakage of fuel vapour. On the other hand, insignificant changes in system behaviour were observed when the fuel pistol angle was changed.