PLoS ONE (Jan 2021)

Vertical tank capacity measurement based on Monte Carlo method.

  • Guoyu Chen,
  • Yong Wan,
  • Huanhuan Lin,
  • Houlin Hu,
  • Guixiong Liu,
  • Yanhua Peng

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0250207
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 16, no. 4
p. e0250207

Abstract

Read online

Vertical tanks are commonly used appliances for liquids, and its capacity is very important for quantitative liquid ratio and liquid trade. In order to measure the capacity of vertical tanks more conveniently, this paper proposes a vertical tank capacity measurement method based on Monte Carlo Method. The method arranges a plurality of sensor points on the inner surface of the tank, and then performs Monte Carlo tests by generating a large number of random sample points, and finally calculates the capacity by counting the sample points that meet the criterion. The criterion for whether a sample point is located in the tank, which is the core issue, is established with the coordinates of sensor points and the distance between different sensor points along the surface of the tank. The results show that the absolute error of the measurement results of the proposed method does not exceed ±0.0003[m3], and the absolute error of capacity per unit volume has a linear relationship with the height of the vertical tank, and has little effect with the radial size of the vertical tank.