• Korean Journal of Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Engineering
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• v.22 no.7
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• pp.442-447
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• 2010

FPSO (Floating Production Strorage and Offloading) method for LNG industry is efficient and facile compared to onshore NG (Natural Gas) treatment facility. Five simple natural gas liquefaction cycles for FPSO are presented and simulated in this paper. SMR (Single Mixed Refrigerant) cycle, SNE (Single Nitrogen Expander) cycle, DNE (Double Nitrogen Expander) cycle, PNE (Precooled Nitrogen Expander) cycle, and PDNE (Precooled Double Nitrogen Expander) cycle are compared. Simple analysis results in this paper show that precooling process and adding an expander in the liquefaction cycle is an effective way to increase liquefaction efficiency.

• International Journal of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.307-322
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• 2014

With the rate of worldwide LNG demand expected to grow faster than that of gas demand, most major oil companies are currently investing their resources to develop floating LNG-FLNG (i.e. LNG FSRU and LNG FPSO). The global Floating LNG (FLNG) market trend will be reviewed based on demand and supply chain relationships. Typical technical issues associated with FLNG design are categorized in terms of global performance evaluation. Although many proven technologies developed through LNG carrier and oil FPSO projects are available for FLNG design, we are still faced with several technical challenges to clear for successful FLNG projects. In this study, some of the challenges encountered during development of the floating LNG facility (i.e. LNG FPSO and FSRU) will be reviewed together with their investigated solution. At the same time, research of new LNG-related technologies such as combined containment system will be presented.

• Ocean Systems Engineering
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.49-68
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• 2012

In this paper, an offshore process front end engineering design (FEED) method is systematically introduced and reviewed to enable efficient offshore oil and gas production plant engineering. An integrated process engineering environment is also presented for the topside systems of a liquefied natural gas floating production, storage, and offloading (LNG FPSO) unit, based on the concepts and procedures for the process FEED of general offshore production plants. Various activities of the general process FEED scheme are first summarized, and then the offshore process FEED method, which is applicable to all types of offshore oil and gas production plants, is presented. The integrated process engineering environment is presented according to the aforementioned FEED method. Finally, the offshore process FEED method is applied to the topside systems of an LNG FPSO in order to verify the validity and applicability of the FEED method.

• Journal of Advanced Research in Ocean Engineering
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.125-135
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• 2017

The paper considers the practical application of the FMEA(Failure Mode and Effect Analysis) method to assess the operational reliability of the LNG(Liquefied Natural Gas) transfer system, which is a potential problem for the connection between the LNG FPSO and LNG carrier. Hazard Identification (HAZID) and Hazard operability (HAZOP) are applied to identify the risks and hazards during the operation of LNG transfer system. The approach is performed for the FMEA to assess the reliability based on the detection of defects typical to LNG transfer system. FTA and FMEA associated with a probabilistic risk database to the operation scenarios are applied to assess the risk. After providing an outline of the safety assessment procedure for the operational problems of system, safety assessment example is presented, providing details on the fault tree of operational accident, safety assessment, and risk measures.

• Journal of Advanced Marine Engineering and Technology
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• v.39 no.3
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• pp.342-347
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• 2015

Floating LNG is a new concept which is used as LNG regasification/receiving facility and for LNG production/export facility. LNG Floating Production Storage and Offloading(FPSO) concept will put vitality into marginal gas fields which were delayed because of excessive investment cost in the world. LNG Floating Storage Regasification Unit(FSRU) also provides commercially competitive and effective solutions to the areas where onshore infrastructure is not well established. LNG cargo containment system is one of the key functions for FLNG to store produced LNG on a floating structure. This paper presents a new technology related to a LNG containment system; a combined cargo containment system utilizing the advantages of iIndependent tank type and membrane system. Technical advantages have been validated through research work.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.37 no.4
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• pp.12-23
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• 2014

The O&M (Operation and Maintenance) phase of offshore plants with a long life cycle requires heavy charges and more efforts than the construction phase, and the occurrence of an accident of an offshore plant causes catastrophic damage. So previous studies have focused on the development of advanced maintenance system to avoid unexpected failures. Nowadays due to the emerging ICTs (Information Communication Technologies) and sensor technologies, it is possible to gather the status data of equipment and send health monitoring data to administrator of an offshore plant in a real time way, which leads to having much concern on the condition based maintenance policy. In this study, we have reviewed previous studies associated with CBM (Condition-Based Maintenance) of offshore plants, and introduced an algorithm predicting the next failure time of the compressor which is one of essential mechanical devices in LNG FPSO (Liquefied Natural Gas Floating Production Storage and Offloading vessel). To develop the algorithm, continuous time Markov model is applied based on gathered vibration data.

• Journal of Advanced Marine Engineering and Technology
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• v.34 no.6
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• pp.798-805
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• 2010

There are no domestic researches of plate fin heat exchanger in the field of cryogenic such as LNG FPSO liquefaction plant. In this study, condensing heat transfer characteristics of nitrogen according to three kinds of fin type in the plate fin heat exchanger were analyzed through simulation and experiment to secure independent technologies. In the simulation, nitrogen was condensed at 69bar and $-140^{\circ}C$ in serrated and wavy fin of plate-fin heat exchanger. The serrated fin shows the highest value of local heat transfer coefficient, followed by wavy and plain fin. The experimental results were shown errors less than 12% comparing with the simulation results.

• Journal of the Society of Naval Architects of Korea
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• v.47 no.5
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• pp.733-742
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• 2010

In this study, optimization was performed to improve the conventional liquefaction process of offshore plants, such as a LNG-FPSO(Liquefied Natural Gas-Floating, Production, Storage, and Offloading unit) by maximizing the energy efficiency of the process. The major equipments of the liquefaction process are compressors, expanders, and heat exchangers. These are connected by stream which has some thermodynamic properties, such as the temperature, pressure, enthalpy or specific volume, and entropy. For this, a process design problem for the liquefaction process of offshore plants was mathematically formulated as an optimization problem. The minimization of the total energy requirement of the liquefaction process was used as an objective function. Governing equations and other equations derived from thermodynamic laws acted as constraints. To solve this problem, the sequential quadratic programming(SQP) method was used. To evaluate the proposed method in this study, it was applied to the natural gas liquefaction process of the LNG-FPSO. The result showed that the proposed method could present the improved liquefaction process minimizing the total energy requirement as compared to conventional process.

• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.95-105
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• 2018

An FLNG (floating liquefied natural gas) or LNG FPSO (floating production, storage and offloading) unit is a notable offshore unit with the increasing demand for LNG. The liquefaction process on an FLNG unit is the most important process because it determines the economic feasibility, but would be a hazard source because of the large quantity of hydrocarbons. While a high efficiency process such as C3MR has been preferred for onshore liquefaction processes, a relatively simple process such as the SMR (single mixed refrigerant) or DMR (dual mixed refrigerant) liquefaction process has been selected for offshore units because they require a more compact size, lighter weight, and higher safety due to their space limitation for facilities and long distance from shore. It is known that an SMR has the advantages of a simple configuration, small footprint, and lower risk. However, with an increased production rate, the inherent safety of SMR needs to be evaluated because of its small train capacity. In this study, the potential explosion risks of the SMR and DMR liquefaction processes were evaluated at the conceptual design stage. The results showed that an SMR has a lower overpressure than a DMR at the same frequency, only with a small production capacity of 0.9 MTPA. With increased capacity, the overpressure of the SMR was higher than that of the DMR. The increased number of trains increased the frequency in spite of the small amount of equipment per train. This showed that the inherent risk of an SMR is not always lower than that of a DMR, and an additional risk management strategy is recommended when an SMR is selected as the concept for an FLNG liquefaction process compared to the DMR liquefaction process.