Cargo ship liquified natural gas tank - photo

[Jon]

Cargo ship liquified natural gas tank.

Fullsize image: https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/h...k_fullsize.jpg




Previously:

Launching an oil tanker ship with airbags - GIF, videos, and photo
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[Loose Ctrl]

Interesting. I thought there would be more baffling inside.

[McDesign]

That's one of the baffles!

Forrest

[Frank S]

Interesting. I thought there would be more baffling inside.

The labyrinth of hob nails and rods secured in the grid pattern covering every surface inside the vessel function as baffles or bulkheads. Instead of large smooth surfaces moving as the ship moves there are billions of smaller surfaces that create movements in all directions at once which would break up the possibility of any continuous wave action by creating small omni directional eddy's in the liquefied Natural gas these millions of random small movements are short cycled due to their small size so the bulk of the liquid is isolated from any large force to create sloshing.
There is a name for it that escapes me right now.

[JTG]

The structures on the inside surface are corrugations in the stainless/invar primary barrier (here's an example), and while they might have some small baffling effect, the actual reason for them is thermal expansion. LNG is shipped around -160 °C (-256 °F), and the tanks have to come back up to room temp for inspection/cleaning between loads -- without massive quantities of expansion bellows, a tank that size would never survive being filled.

[McDesign]

Man, that's interesting info! I'd never thought about how they dealt with thermal movement - cool, cool, stuff!

Forrest