In 2018 in China, the natural gas import reached 90.39 million tons, and the liquefied natural gas (LNG) import was 53.78 million tons, accounting for 59.5% of total natural gas imports. As an important infrastructure for LNG import, 21 LNG terminals have been built in China up to now. With the construction of LNG terminals, more researches on the leakage of LNG storage and transportation facilities have emerged to prevent catastrophic consequences such as explosions and frostbite.

However, most of previous researches focused on gas pipeline leakage after LNG gasification, and few of those have been done on LNG liquid pipeline leakage. In this paper, the Fluent software is used to numerically simulate the process of LNG liquid pipeline leakage. After the occurrence of LNG leakage, it will suffer the process of endothermic, evaporation, and diffusion, which is considered as a two-phase diffusion process. The Euler-Lagrangian method is introduced to simulate the diffusion process of liquid phase and gas phase separately. In the simulation, the liquid phase is regarded as discrete droplets for discrete processing. The movement trajectory, heat transfer process and evaporation process of each droplet are tracked respectively. Different from the liquid phase, the gas phase is regarded as a continuous phase and the N-S equation is adopted for calculation. To increase the accuracy of simulation, the near ground diffusion process is dealed with a turbulence model. Thereafter, coupling calculations of two phase are performed to determine the concentration field and temperature field of the LNG liquid pipeline leakage. As a supplement to this research, the influence of wind speed on LNG leakage and diffusion process is analyzed in detail.

Finally, the numerical simulation method is successfuly applied to a coastal LNG terminal in northern China. The results can provide scientific reference for the establishment of emergency response strategy and the delimitation of risky zones.


The Application of Numerical Simulation to Liquid Pipeline Leakage at Lng Terminal in China

Division / Sponsors: 
Pipeline Systems Division

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IPC/IPC2020/volume/84447

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