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Park 2017
Park 2017
OMAE2017
June 25-30, 2017, Trondheim, Norway
OMAE2017-61609
ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION
In offshore operations, overpressure of pressure vessels can There are many pressure vessels to store fluids or separate
arise in case of emergencies like fire or malfunction of valves. phases in offshore oil and gas platforms. In operation, a pressure
This situation can cause physical damages of the vessel and, vessel can be damaged from overpressure in emergencies such
operation break. Thus, managing overpressure is important in as excessive inlet flows or malfunction of valves on the side of
terms of safety of offshore facilities. To handle the overpressure outlet flows. Thus, it is necessary to remove the pressure quickly
problems, the rapid depressurization, so-called 'Blowdown', is when overpressure occurs. API Standard 521 (API, 2007)
used. During depressurization, temperature of internal fluids in a recommended that efficient depressurization condition is to
vessel get decreases by the expansion of the fluids. Predicting decrease the pressure in the vessels below 50% of design
decrease of the temperature is critical to choose the material of a pressure or 690kPa in 15minutes.
pressure vessel. Overdesign without the prediction leads to the During the depressurization, the expansion of the vapor in
rapidly decreasing profit margins. For these reasons, the the vessel causes a sudden drop of the temperature. If the
analyzing dynamic behavior of thermodynamics properties like temperature of the wall contacted with fluid reaches the ductile-
temperature is required for material selection and design brittle transition temperature (DBTT) of the vessel material, the
verification during depressurization. In this study, a dynamic vessel can also be broken easily by small forces. Therefore, it is
model for depressurization was developed to simulate important to estimate the temperature change over time at the
thermodynamics behavior in a vessel during depressurization design stage and reflect it in the production of the pressure
including low temperature phenomena. The model contains non- vessel.
equilibrium zone between phases, heat transfer between walls The vapor inside the vessel is condensed into liquid when
and fluids in the vessels. The heat transfer coefficient between the gas is expanded and the temperature drops. After the liquid
internal vapor and wall was calculated from a combined occurs, the temperature of the wall contacted with the liquid
convection that includes the both natural and forced convection. decreases more than the vapor. The wall contacted with the liquid
This study includes the calculation of liquid/wall heat transfer lose more heat than the wall contacted with the vapor due to the
coefficient. During depressurization, liquid in the vessel heat transfer from vaporization. Therefore, it is important to
becomes boiling closed to surface of the wall because the estimate the heat transfer coefficient between the liquid and the
temperature of the wall is higher than the boiling point of the wall.
liquid. This phenomenon can be described as 'nucleate boiling', When the temperature of the wall is higher than the
causes decreasing convective heat transfer coefficient from inner saturation temperature of the liquid, the liquid boils. This
wall to the liquid in the vessel. Using the proper correlations phenomenon is called ‘pool boiling’. Figure 1 was first presented
about this phenomenon, the calculated coefficient made this by Nukiyama and is often referred to as Nukiyama’s curve.
study get closer to reality. The results were compared to (Nukiyama, 1934) This graph shows the correlation between
experimental and simulation data from literature and it shows difference between the temperature of the wall contacted with
this model can properly estimate the thermodynamic property the liquid and the saturation temperature of the liquid and the
change in a vessel. heat flux exchanged between the liquid and the wall. The reason
why the heat flux changes with the temperature difference is that
the amount of bubbles affects the heat transfer coefficient.
According to the curve, the pool boiling regime is divided into
𝑁𝑢 = 𝐶1 𝑅𝑒 𝑥 𝑃𝑟 𝑦
𝑁𝑢 = Nusselt number for boiling
𝑞 = h ∙ A ∙ 𝛥𝑇
𝑞 = heat flux from the wall to the liquid
h = heat transfer coefficient of mixed substances
A = area of the wall contacted with the liquid
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RESULT
Figure 3 Pressure-time graph during depressurization
Using the simulator of depressurization, the pressure and the
temperature of the internal fluid and internal wall with the
2) aapor temperature vs time
variation of time were calculated. The condition of this
At the early stage, because the internal vapor has a relatively
simulation was based on experimental data released by Haque
small heat capacity, the temperature drops sharply when the
(Haque et al., 1992). A vertical cylindrical suction scrubber was
energy of the vapor is lost due to the rapid expansion. At the latter
used for the experiments and its dimension was 3.24m length,
stage, the temperature is rebounded by the heat transfer from the
1.13m inner diameter, 59mm thickness, 2.75m Tan-to-tan length.
wall.
A valve which has 10mm choke diameter was connected with the
The experimental data of temperature was given as the area
top of the vessel. The vessel material was assumed to stainless
because the measurement was made by attaching the sensor to
steel, SS 304. The results are compared with the experimental
various positions inside the pressure vessels. Figure 4 presents
data, and also previous studies named as BLOWDOWN (Haque
the simulated vapor temperature compared to the experimental
et al., 1992, Mahgerefteh and Wong, 1999), aBSIM
data, previous studies and commercial software
(D’Alessandro, Giacchetta et al., 2015) and commercial software
(HYSYS v9).
1) Pressure vs Time
As depressurization progresses, the pressure in the pressure
vessel tended to decrease sharply at the early stage due to the
sudden pressure difference between inlet and outlet of the valve
and at the latter stage, the pressure tended to decrease gradually.
Figure 3 show this tendency well.
This study, previous studies and commercial software
showed high accuracy consistent with the experimental data.
CONCLUSION
This study implemented the simulation of rapid
depressurization for pressure vessel containing hydrocarbon
mixture. It reflected the reality by considering non-equilibrium
conditions between vapor phase and liquid phase in pressure
vessel, and the results were compared with the experimental
data, previous studies and commercial software to validate this
model.
In order to increase the accuracy of the heat transfer model,
an accurate model considering the nucleate boiling phenomenon
was proposed. In particular, the correlation was used to calculate
Figure 5 Liquid temperature-time graph during rapid the nucleate boiling heat transfer coefficient of mixtures. And it
depressurization was proved by comparison with the experimental data.