Validation of Air Recirculation by CFD on the Multi-Pass Air Heater for LNG Vaporization

In order to comply with the LNG industry's requirements for minimizing life cycle costs, the ambient air heater vaporization in association with closed loop heat transfer fluid system has been developed. This vaporization system has been proved and is a new trend in the LNG industry. However, one of the biggest concerns is to estimate the air recirculation across the air heater. Lower temperatures at the air heater inlet can cause a reduction in heat extraction from the air as a re-useable heat source. Understanding the mechanism for the temperature decrease is beneficial for designing the facility in a better way considering adequate design margins.

This paper presents effect of key parameters and variables on designing the ambient air heater with a proposal for optimization process of the ambient air heater vaporization. The paper also discusses the effective usage of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modeling for optimizing the air heater vaporization system. Models are through the interaction of the multi-pass air heat exchange tubes with the meteorological data at the given site plot.