A Similarity Model of the Cooling Process of Fluids during Transportation

This article presents a description of a novel method for the identification of a decrease in the temperature of a liquid medium transported by railroad tank cars. No exact analytical solution exists for this phenomenon; therefore, the authors of this article have prepared a mathematical expression for the cooling process of the transported fluid by applying a dimensional analysis, which facilitated the identification of the dimensionless criteria using the relevant dimensional parameters. A functional dependence between the criteria can be identified through a physical or numerical experiment. In this case, a database of the results from a detailed numerical model was used; however, its disadvantage is that the calculation takes much longer than in a simpler similarity model. The output of the similarity model was a function of the average temperature of the fluid at a time applicable to various alternatives in the geometrical, physical, and boundary conditions. The standard deviation of the difference between the temperatures predicted by the similarity model and those calculated by the numerical simulation Tmod − Tsim represented 4.8% relative to the simulated fluid temperature.