How can waves significantly impact the performance of an amine unit installed on a FLNG?

The design of the acid gas removal unit is of great importance to overcome and complete successfully a FLNG project. It is necessary to build up accurate knowledge of the impact of the movements on the towers operation, to first secure then to optimize the design of the processing units. Indeed both flooding and internals efficiency significantly impacts tower sizing and thus the whole FLNG project. Total, Prosemat, and IFP Energies nouvelles have conducted a 4-yr research and development program at Heriot-Watt University to model mass trasnfer and hydraulics of a tilting and moving tower. In order to better understand the impact of the column diameter on the results and to be able to scale-up the results, two different column sizes were used.The first phase of tests included static and pitch tests with varying periods and angles, at different liquid loads to map the distortion of liquid distribution at several heights of packing. A second test phase has been launched at the start of 2015 with a column installed on a hexapod. The machine will allow quanitfying the impact of accelerations and three-dimensional motions on the hydraulics and mass transfer of gas/liquid contacting tower.