Numerical Analysis and Experiment of Starfined Vaporizer for Liquefied Natural Gas

LNG Vaporizers must be smaller, more efficient, and easier to operate and maintain. Recently, the vaporizers with greatly enhanced performance as compared to conventional type have been developed to fulfill these requirements. This paper was studied for optimum design of the used vaporizer at a satellite station. Generally, the moisture freezing of air is created by temperature drop under 0°C on vaporizer surface. This problem is increasingly appeared as time passed and humidity rise. In addition, the moisture freezing makes an ice layer and heat transfer on vaporizer is decreased by the ice layer form into the adiabatic condition. By this reason, recent vaporizer system is installed as parallel type, and it takes tree times of vaporizer capacity. But this vaporizer system has much installation costs and is restricted by some space. To solve this problem is very important, and main impacts of vaporizer can be the circumference distance or angle between fin and fin, length, thickness, materials, temperature conditions inner vaporizer and so on. This paper was carried out the numerical analysis and experiment to get the optimum design information of vaporizer fin for liquefied natural gas with super low temperature. The geometry of numerical analysis and experiment were identical. Used parameters are the circumference distance or angle between fins, and fin thickness of vaporizer. Results on numerical analysis were represented about the correlations with the ice layer thickness of vaporizer surface according to the temperature variations inner vaporizer, fin thickness and circumference distance between fins of vaporizer. These results were also verified by experimental study. Finally, the information for optimum design of vaporizer was proposed with correlation equations in this paper.