A new design and thermo-mechanical coupled analysis for internal supports of the cryogenic fluids tanks

Heat transfer through the internal supports of the cryogenic fluid tanks is an important issue in the tank design and manufacture. On the other hand, the internal supports strength should be enough to stand safely against the forces applied to the internal tank. From the heat insulation point of view, most of the polymers are suitable materials to use in the internal supports. But the low mechanical strength of the most of the polymers limits the life of the supports made from polymers. In this paper, a new composite support made from steel and polymer is presented for the internal supports. Multilayered design of the steel part of the presented supports controls the heat transfer through this part by adding more thermal contact resistance (TCR) to the heat flow path. An analytical model is developed to calculate TCR between layers of the steel part at various pressure and temperature conditions. A thermo-mechanical coupled finite element (FE) model is developed for the proposed support and solved by ANSYS FE code. Temperature distribution and heat flux of the presented support are investigated by FE analysis results. Heat flow through the new support design is compared with the heat flow of the supports constructed with polymer blocks. Comparison of the heat flow results shows that the amount of heat transferred to the cryogenic tank through the internal supports in the static loading condition decreases when using proposed composite design instead of polymer blocks.