CFD modeling of a diesel evaporator used in fuel cell systems

•An evaporator to be used as a part of a diesel fuel processor is modeled using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software ANSYS.•Fractional distillation curves of product diesel are obtained experimentally at different pressure.•Distillation temperatures of diesel fuel in evaporator are predicted.

Diesel evaporators are one of the key components of diesel fuel processing for fuel cells. Diesel evaporator is required to evaporate diesel fuel in diesel fueled fuel cell systems. In this study, diesel evaporator which is a spiral-tube heat exchanger via indirect heat supplied by hot nitrogen gas is modeled and the fractional distillation curve results of diesel fuel are compared to experimental data reported in literature. In this work, the ANSYS Fluent 14.0 Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code is used to simulate the 3-dimensional, turbulent, two-phase, multi-component and reacting flow-field, developed in a diesel evaporator.