(17c) Mechanism of Sloshing Minimization in Offshore Separator By CFD Simulation

Liquid sloshing in vessels caused by forced acceleration has been the subject of intense investigations for last several decades both by experiments and numerical simulations. Many studies are done to minimize the sloshing induced forces on the vessel internals and some studies focused on different ways to describe the sloshing patterns. In the literature, the focus of sloshing suppression has been varying different internals such as number of baffles, spacing, height and shape of these internals. The main factors behind sloshing reduction are alteration of frequency and energy dissipation. Few previous works have highlighted these reasons. However, there is a dearth of work in quantifying the frequency alteration and energy dissipation along with different combinations of vessel internals especially in 3D cylindrical tank.  This present work tries to fill this gap by exploring sloshing minimization through Computation Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation for offshore separator. Several parameters were varied including baffles number, spacing, thickness, percentage opening subjected to wave induced vessel motions, motion frequency, amplitudes in various sea state conditions ( e.g. surge, sway, roll, pitch). Parameters such as hydrodynamic force, pressure, moments, turbulent kinetic energy, height of the free surface, velocity, kinetic energy, sloshing frequency etc are used to quantify the sloshing intensity. In addition, visual inspections of sloshing motion are done through gas-liquid/oil-water interface fluctuation, streamlines, vector profiles. Correlations between these parameters influencing the sloshing intensity will be developed to understand the sloshing mechanism.