PREMATURE SHUT OFF POSSIBILITY PREDICTION FOR AUTOMOTIVE FUEL TANK SYSTEM

Abstract

Prediction of the possibility of a vehicle fuel tank supply process premature shut off is of main concern for the automotive industry. The main objective of this work is to show that premature shut off can be explained by the absence of a steady state after the initial transient in the fuel supply process. The vehicle fuel tank considered in this work is composed only of a rectilinear pipe inclined with respect to the horizontal and connected to the top of a rectangular tank. The counter-current two-phase flow in the pipe is modeled using the one-dimensional drift flux model and the tank is modeled as a control volume where mass conservation for each phase is considered. Linear stability analysis of the two-phase flow model shows the absence of the steady state phase for a range of liquid flow rates before the flooding condition is achieved as a function of tube inclination and length. This fact suggests that premature shut off occurs due to the absence of a steady state regime phase during the fuel supply process.