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When a vehicle with a partially filled fuel tank undergoes sudden acceleration, braking, turning or pitching motion, fuel sloshing is experienced. It is important to establish a CAE methodology to accurately predict slosh phenomenon. Fuel slosh can lead to many failure modes such as noise, erroneous fuel indication, irregular fuel supply at low fuel level and durability issues caused by high impact forces on tank surface and internal parts. This paper summarizes activities carried out by the fuel system team at Ford Motor Company to develop and validate such CAE methodology. In particular two methods are discussed here. The first method is Volume Of Fluid (VOF) based incompressible multiphase Eulerian transient CAE method. The CFD solvers used here are Star CD and Star CCM+. The second method incorporates Fluid-Structure interaction (FSI) using Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) formulation.

Leakage and permeability through fuel systems is an ongoing problem that both environmentalists and automakers face, but with the application of multi-layer plastic material technology and new manufacturing processes of internalizing components, partial zero emissions vehicles (PZEV) can be achieved. The legislative requirements that must be met for the future fuel systems regarding their permeation and leakage performance are discussed. Recent efforts on how the automotive industry is responding to meet those challenges are also presented.