• Journal of the Korean Institute of Gas
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.27-32
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• 2013

Natural gas liquefaction process which is operated under cryogenic condition spends large amount of energy. Most of energy in the natural gas liquefaction process is consumed by compressors. Therefore, minimizing energy consumption of compressors is an important issue in process design and operation. Among various natural gas liquefaction processes, propane pre-cooled mixed refrigerant (C3MR) process consists of mixed refrigerant system and pure refrigerant system. In this study, to find the optimal design of pure refrigerant system, pure refrigerant cycle is simulated on different number of pressure levels and the necessary energy of each design is compared. After that, the driver selection model is applied to analyse each processes, which has different number of equipments, in terms of cost. As the result, the design using many equipments spends lower energy. Using this result, this study suggests standard of process design selection by the cost term.

• 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.

• Korean Chemical Engineering Research
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• v.51 no.1
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• pp.25-34
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• 2013

The paper reviews the state of art in the design of liquefaction processes for the production of liquified natural gas, and addresses key design aspects to be considered in the design and how these design issues are systematically reflected in industrial applications. Various design options to improve energy efficiency of refrigeration cycles are discussed, including cascaded or multi-level pure refrigeration cycles which are used for covering wide range of cooling temperature, as well as mixed refrigerant cycle which can maintain a simple structure. Heat integration technique has been used for graphically examining differences of commercial cycles discussed in this paper, while energy efficiency and economics of commercial liquefaction processes has been summarized. Discussion also has been made about how to select the most appropriate set of drivers for compressors used in the liquefaction plant.

• Korean Chemical Engineering Research
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• v.51 no.6
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• pp.677-684
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• 2013

A mixed refrigerant cycle (MRC) has been widely used in liquefaction of natural gas because it is simple and easily operable with reasonable equipment costs. One of the important techniques in MRC is selection of a refrigerant mixture and decision of its optimum mixing ratio. In this work, it is examined whether mixture components (refrigerants) and their mixing ratio influence performance of general MRC processes. In doing this, mixture design and response surface method, which are well-known statistical techniques, are used to find optimal mixture refrigerants and their optimal mixing ratio that minimize total energy consumption of the entire liquefaction process. A MRC process using several refrigerants and various mixing ratios is simulated by Aspen HYSYS and mixture design and response surface method are implemented using Minitab. According to the results, methane ($C_1$), ethane ($C_2$), propane ($C_3$) and nitrogen ($N_2$) are selected as best mixture refrigerants and the determined mixture ratio (mole ration) can reduce total energy consumption by up to 50%.

• Progress in Superconductivity and Cryogenics
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.20-24
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• 2020

The purpose of this analytic study is to design and examine an efficient hydrogen liquefaction cycle by using a pre-cooler. The liquefaction cycle is primarily comprised of a pre-cooler and a refrigerator. The fed hydrogen gas is cooled down from ambient temperature (300 K) to the pre-cooling coolant temperature (either 77 K or 120 K approximately) through the pre-cooler. There are two pre-cooling methods: a single pre-coolant pre-cooler and a cascade pre-cooler which uses two levels of pre-coolants. After heat exchanging with the pre-cooler, the hydrogen gas is further cooled and finally liquefied through the refrigerator. The working fluids of the potential pre-cooling cycle are selected as liquid nitrogen and liquefied natural gas. A commercial software Aspen HYSYS is utilized to perform the numerical simulation of the proposed liquefaction cycle. Efficiency is compared with respect to the various conditions of the heat exchanging part of the pre-cooler. The analysis results show that the cascade method is more efficient, and the heat exchanging part of the pre-coolers should have specific UA ratios to maximize both spatial and energy efficiencies. This paper presents the quantitative performance of the pre-cooler in the hydrogen liquefaction cycle in detail, which shall be useful for designing an energy-efficient liquefaction system.

• Journal of Advanced Marine Engineering and Technology
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.46-52
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• 2010

In this study, several types of natural gas liquefaction processes using two staged Inter-cooler are simulated and designed to secure a competitiveness in the industry of natural gas liquefaction plant. These processes are based on basic cascade process, and all of these are improved with two staged compressors type. One of types is applied Inter-cooler to each cycle such as propane, ethylene, methane, the other type is applied Inter-cooler to whole cycle. These processes are compared characteristics of performance with basic process. Cascade process with two staged Inter-cooler in the whole cycle is on the top ranked with increment ratio of COP about 13.7 ~ 20.5%, and yield efficiency of this process are improved comparing with the basic process by 23.8% ~ 35% lower specific power, respectively.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Marine Engineers Conference
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• 2006.06a
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• pp.233-234
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• 2006

LNG is extremely cold, $-160^{\circ}C$ in its liquid state. When it vaporizes, returning to its natural state (re-vaporization), it cools its surroundings. This is cold energy. The manufacturing of liquid air is the first processes developed as the most effective utilization of LNG cold. In this paper, adopting the LNG cold process for manufacturing liquid air was developed and analysed. The result showed that as the higher air pressure and adapting nitrogen precooling, liquefaction rate and cumulative mass was increased.

• Transactions of the Korean hydrogen and new energy society
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• v.34 no.2
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• pp.226-233
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• 2023

In this study, we compared the performance of several refrigeration cycles using different refrigerants and utilizing the cold heat of liquefied natural gas (LNG) for the liquefaction of carbon dioxide. The final conditions for the liquefied CO₂ were set to -20℃ and 20 bar. The refrigerants used included R404a, ammonia, propane, and propylene using a vapor recompression refrigeration cycle. For the refrigeration cycle, the CO₂ at room temperature and pressure was compressed in a two-stage compression process with an intermediate cooling stage using a refrigeration unit. To compare with the liquefaction process using refrigeration, we compressed the CO₂ to 8 bar in a single compression stage and cooled it to around -50℃ using the cold heat of the LNG before liquefying it. Results showed that using ammonia as the refrigerant required the least amount of compressor power for the liquefaction process, and the heat transfer area of the evaporator was the smallest when using propylene as the refrigerant. Using the cold heat of LNG instead of refrigeration using R404a resulted in approximately 69% less energy consumption.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Gas
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.7-12
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• 2016

Natural gas liquefaction process is essential to transport natural gas for long distances. Lots of compressors in this process are needed and the energy for these compressors can be supplied by drivers. Total driver cost can be changed by selecting various drivers. This study focused on the minimization of the driver cost to provide the energy to the compressors. Moreover, scenarios, extracting velocity is changed during whole operating period, are set with considering gas well capacity. The mathematical model was established by considering trade off relationship between the capital cost and the operating cost of the turbines. The model also considers the life time of the driver equipments. As the result, the driver cost of the optimized case was reduced by 6.4% than the base case.

• Clean Technology
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.314-320
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• 2014

The purpose of this work is to optimize composition of mixture refrigerants used in the C3MR (Propane & Mixed Refrigerants) process by a statistical optimization technique. C3MR studied in this work is one of widely used commercial natural gas liquefaction processes with high efficiency. Process simulation was performed in a commercial process simulator and methane ($C_1$), ethane ($C_2$), propane ($C_3$), and nitrogen ($N_2$) were selected as mixed refrigerants. Using the process model, optimum composition of refrigerants mixture was determined via mixture design and central composite design to produce minimum energy consumption. As a result, it was confirmed that energy consumption is reduced down to 11.3% comparing to existing design. It was also compared with heat effectiveness through temperature profile of MCHE (main cryogenic heat exchanger).