Design of heat transfer in submerged combustion vaporizer

Abstract Submerged combustion vaporizer (SCV) is used to vaporize the liquefied natural gas (LNG) stored in a cryogenic state, which is efficient as both peak shaving and base load vaporizer in the LNG terminal. Analysis of heat transfer is essential to SCV design. This paper is focused on developing a method based on CFD simulation and theoretical calculation to describe the heat transfer in SCV, especially the two-phase flow of high temperature flue gas and water sweeping across the horizontal serpentine tube bundle. For the heat transfer inside the tube bundle, we found that the Petukhov model was able to appropriately demonstrate the influence of the variation of LNG properties around the pseudo-critical temperature on the heat transfer coefficient with a high precision. Finally a systematic method to design the heat transfer in SCV was given, whose feasibility was confirmed by a practical case study of a SCV in service.

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