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

The impact of motion on the performance of an acid gas absorption column with amines installed on a floating LNG (FLNG) was studied to secure and optimize the design of a floating acid gas removal unit. Depending on operating conditions, a significant impact on liquid distribution was observed in the packing bed, leading to differentiated wetted zones, including dry and overloaded areas. It was confirmed that careful margins are necessary to secure the design of FLNG AGRU since packing does not prevent liquid to distort from nice-to-have-like distribution. Motion effects on liquid distribution were significant and increased with the bed height and the tilt angle. The use of two different columns allowed extrapolating present results to larger industrial columns, which is fundamental to build a robust maldistribution model. Some examples were presented, illustrating the impact on tower efficiency and the corresponding tower oversizing based on the results of test campaign. This is an abstract of a paper presented at the Offshore Technology Conference 2014 (Houston, TX 5/5-8/2014).