There is currently no open LNG plant facility dedicated to research and training available anywhere in the world; any ‘live’ training is only done on operating plants with sufficiently experienced personnel and any research facilities are proprietary and closed. This project will establish a pilot-scale LNG research facility and complete, at least, the detailed engineering design of a future micro-scale LNG facility for operator training. Unlike operating industrial plants, these research and training component facilities will be designed by the PhD student to have the necessary instrumentation needed to rigorously test the foundation thermodynamic and hydrodynamic models used to describe each unit operation. Stringent tests of these models, conducted through full process simulations of the entire facility using multiple software packages (VMGSIM and HYSYS), will be used to quantitatively compare the various models and their sensitivity to LNG plant scale. A particular focus will be the acid gas removal systems, which are notoriously difficult to model reliably at both very small and very large production scales. Latest brief for the project.
Microscale LNG Facility for R&D
