Fuel Tank Stainless or Alum 3

[Christo_AU]

Hi All. We have to fabricate a 200 litre (50 gallon) fuel tank that will be underslung a trailer. This fuel is not for the truck, it is for a generator mounted on the trailer. Someone told me that it is better to fabricate it from alum sheet, because they said stainless steel sheet will crack. Can someone please validate this and explain why stainless steel sheet will crack but not aluminium sheet when used for a tank on a trailer?

 

[Christo_AU]

Thanks all for the feedback. This has been most helpful.

 

[ASIT859]

@TugboatEng,

This is may be off topic but I was under the impression that ULSD (with water present) was actually more conducive to microbial growth than previous diesel with higher sulphur concentrations.

Or perhaps that’s only due to the addition of biofuel?

Link

 

[TugboatEng]

The article doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. There is talk about Ethanol causing water absorption but I don't agree with this line:

It has been shown that mixing ULSD with small amounts of biofuel, such as ethanol, may accelerate tank corrosion. This is due to the microbes in the diesel fuel digesting trace amounts of ethanol, creating high-enough levels of acetic acid to cause significant corrosion of the surrounding tank.

Who mixes diesel with ethanol? Microbes don't digest ethanol, they produce it. Ethanol in excess of 10% is quite deadly to microbes which limits microbial growth.

Meanwhile, sulfate reducing bacteria are a well known cause of corrosion in tanks.

The article also goes on about lubricity issues. I've never seen any evidence that a reduction in lubricity has ever caused problems. Sandia National Labs analysed some pumps run on low lubricity fuel and none of the pumps failed due to fuel lubricity.

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA234930.pdf