Fluid flow characteristic around round-shaped FPSO

Abstract

Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) is currently representing almost 30% of the imported natural gas worldwide. In order to cover the demand of LNG, there is growing interest to unlock and monetize these reserves with LNG FPSO (Liquefied Natural Gas Floating Production Storage Offloading) facilities. Development of design concepts of the FPSO starts with a shape like a ship. Nowadays concept of FPSO is round-shaped which is given much advantage than the ship-shaped. Fluid flow around hull is one of phenomena that occur on the round-shaped FPSO during the operation. Fluid flow characteristic around round-shaped FPSO is presented by developing Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code based on Reynolds Average Navier-Stokes (RANS) method. The simulation program is developed using Fortran language. Pressure distribution, axial velocity, and wave elevation around the hull are simulated using CFD code with different Froude numbers. Grids of the hull are generated using Maxsurf software before simulated. The obtained result found the critical part at stern (0.6 < X/(L/2) < 1).