Validation of Air Recirculation by CFD on the Multi-pass Air Heater for LNG Vaporization

摘要

In order to comply with the LNG industry’s requirements for minimizing life cyclecosts, the ambient air heater vaporization in association with closed loop heat transferfluid system has been developed. This vaporization system has been proved and is a newtrend in the LNG industry. However, one of the biggest concerns is to estimate the airrecirculation across the air heater. Lower temperatures at the air heater inlet can cause areduction in heat extraction from the air as a re-useable heat source. Understanding themechanism for the temperature decrease is beneficial for designing the facility in a betterway considering adequate design margins.This paper presents effect of key parameters and variables on designing theambient air heater with a proposal for optimization process of the ambient air heatervaporization. The paper also discusses the effective usage of Computational FluidDynamics (CFD) modeling for optimizing the air heater vaporization system. Models arethrough the interaction of the multi-pass air heat exchange tubes with the meteorologicaldata at the given site plot.