Overview

An evening event with a technical presentation by the Technical Professional team from Honeywell and time for networking over refreshments.

This event is free and open to all. Bring along your colleagues and introduce them to the Oil & Natural Gas Special Interest Group (SONG) and to IChemE.

Topic

Depressuring process equipment in response to fires, leaks, pipe ruptures or other hazards, as well as for planned shutdowns, is critical to safe operation. Accurate design of blowdown systems is therefore essential. A blowdown system design typically focuses on the sizing of relief devices and selection of the materials of construction.

Existing process simulation tools meet these sizing and selection requirements, but do not have enough sophistication in the design calculations, which results in either a poorly designed (safety risk) or an over-designed vessel (high capital cost). UniSim Design’s Equation Oriented based Blowdown tool was developed and validated based on industry standards that help to increases accuracy and minimize over-design.

The tool uses a non-equilibrium model vs a standard equilibrium model used by other legacy solutions available in the market today. A non-equilibrium model is available in academic literature, but it lacks specific mathematical details. The model designed in the UniSim Design EO platform improves upon this foundation by rigorously handling 3 phase (gas, liquid and water) systems and providing for a wide variety of thermodynamic models. It also incorporates better correlations for heat-transfer coefficients and rigours formulas for volumes, surface and interfacial areas.

In addition to the rigorous and detailed vessel model, the tool uses the EO platform to allow users to simulate a detailed converging flowsheet from Blowdown vessel sources to the Flare tips. This allows users to simulate more realistic backpressure at the blowdown vessel by considering the pressure drops in the system and thus provide a more accurate basis to estimate the orifice size.

Another key aspect of the EO flowsheet-based Blowdown is its ability to simulate Staggered Blowdown. Conventionally a single vessel and orifice blowdown have been considered by process engineers. Though quick, their results were always simplified and conservative. The EO Blowdown tool in UniSim Design comes built-in with a Dynamic Scheduler that allows users to schedule blowdown based on time or process conditions. Lastly, the tool complies with the industry standards for ANSI/API Standard 521 fire methods.

Another key aspect of developing this tool with the rigorously detailed calculations was the speed at which the calculations could solve. Conventional sequential solvers would fail to solve detailed flowsheets for non-equilibrium vessels. Hence, UniSim Design’s Blowdown Utility was built on the UniSim EvOlution platform that uses an Equation Oriented (EO) simultaneous solver. The EO solver has multiple advantages over its legacy predecessor, especially in faster optimization applications.

Paper

A paper published by Honeywell in Hydrocarbon Processing Magazine. This paper is about Dynamic Models for Designing Pressure Vessels.

Speaker

Low Wai Chong, Technical Solutions Consultant - SEA

Low Wai Chong is the Technical Solutions Consultant for Honeywell Connected Plant’s Simulation Business in South East Asia. He leads the Business Development and Technical Consulting for the Operation Competency and UniSim Suite of products. Low Wai Chong has been with Honeywell for over 10 years and is a Chemical Engineer by education. Previously he was working under PETRONAS GTS. His overall 17+ years of experience spans across SEA in Competency and Simulation Projects, Operations, Business Development and Sales Consulting. Over the last 5 years, Low Wai Chong has been part of the business which is now the pillar of Honeywell’s Connected Story for Industrial Software. As part of the Connected Process Business, he interacts with customers to propose solutions that help customers analyse and diagnose real-time process challenges through the Connected portfolio.

Time

Registration from 17:30 – the event will commence at 18:00 and close at 20:00.

Attire

The suggested attire would be formal for men and women. Improper attire such as round neck t-shirt, jeans, slippers and safety boots, etc are not allowed.

Sponsors

IChemE gratefully acknowledges:

• PETRONAS Group Technical Solutions (GTS) sponsorship of SONG evening talks.
• EAST One-Zero-One organizers of SONG evening talks.

Get involved

Would you like to give a talk at a SONG event in Kuala Lumpur, or online to a wider audience of chemical engineers in the Asia Pacific region? We'd like to hear from you. Please contact Mohan Balasingam or with details about yourself and proposed a presentation.

Webinar

For those who are unable to attend in person, this event will also be broadcasted as a webinar.