tank temperature

[gmax137]

I want to determine the maximum expected temperature of water in a large (350,000 gallon) steel tank. The tank is located outdoors in southern florida. The daily maximum air temperature is something like 91 F, but the tank is exposed to normal sunlight. If it saw a number of bright sunny days and warm cloudy nights I think it would heat up above ambient. How do I calculate the daily heating and nightly cooling?

I need a method to get to a quantitative answer, just saying, "its a big tank, it wont heat up much..." isn't good enough for this application.

Thanks

 

[MintJulep]

The heat transfer part is pretty straight-forward.

The hard part will be deciding on the meteorological conditions to use in the analysis.

Fuzzy phrases like "maximum expected temperature" don't really mean much.

 

[vpl]

There is insufficient information provided to solve this problem. However, to slightly paraphrase MintJulep's excellent reply to thread 319-219156:

This seems to be a fairly straight-forward heat transfer issue. The equations governing heat transfer (conduction and radiation probably, though there is insufficient information to judge) can be found in any heat transfer text.

If you don't have one on your bookshelf a perfectly fine one may be downloaded (legally and free) here:

http://web.mit.edu/lienhard/

http://www/ahtt.html

Patricia Lougheed

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