Unveil the Mystery of Air Products APCI C3MR LNG

Liquefaction Process in HYSYS

You are an LNG professional. You understand Air Product C3MR is the most popular LNG liquefaction
process. But do you really know all the ins and outs of the C3MR process? All the mystery of the APCI
C3MR LNG process will be unveiled in this video.
The process is developed based on the published process diagram by Air Products.
As you know, C3 means propane and MR means mixed refrigerant. As you see, natural gas is first
precooled by the propane refrigeration loop and then liquefied by the mixed refrigerant loop.
Just like the ConocoPhillips Optimized Cascade LNG process, Propane is compressed in a three-stage
compressor and the pressure is letting down stage by stage to match natural gas cooling curve as close
as possible. In addition, two flash economizer drums are used to improve the performance of the propane
loop. More explanation about the propane refrigerant loop can be found in my other video
at http://showcase.guofuchen.com/2015/03/unveil-mystery-of-conocophillips.html
After compressed in a three-stage compressor, the mixed refrigerant is also cooled down to about -27 F
by the propane refrigeration loop. Then it goes to a two phase separator, where the gas is cooled in the
mixed refrigerant chiller 1 and then finally subcooled in the mixed refrigerant chiller 2. The subcooled
liquid of stream 207 is then flashed to a lower pressure of about 70 psia, where it has the lowest
temperature of about -254.4 F in the system. The coldest gas is used to liquefy the natural gas and the
high pressure mixed refrigerant stream of 206. As mentioned earlier, the liquid outlet of the two phase
separator is further subcooled in the mixed refrigerant chiller 1 and then drops the pressure and combines
with the stream of 209. Together the mixed stream of 214 is used to chill the natural gas stream of 4,
mixed refrigerant vapor of 205 and mixed refrigerant liquid of 211. The heated gas of 215 at a
temperature of about -31 F is then sent to the mixed refrigerant compressor, thus it forms a completely
closed mixed refrigerant loop.
Let us take a look at the composite heat release curve. The Y-Axis is the heat flow and the X-Axis is the
temperature and they match very closely, especially at the cold end. The other view is the delta
temperature Vs. the temperature. As you can see, there are almost 6 points that have a pinch of about 4
F.

As some readers recall, Guofu also developed a HYSYS simulation with ConocoPhillips Optimized
Cascade LNG process. In that simulation, the same 5 million metric ton per year natural gas is liquefied
with a power consumption of about 191,600 kW. While with the APCI C3MR process, as you see, the
power consumption is about 179,900 kW. With this said, the C3MR process can save the liquefaction
power by about 6%, comparing against the ConocoPhillips Optimized Cascade process.
Thanks for watching this video, it is brought to you by +Guofu Chen ; more interesting topics can be found
atshowcase.guofuchen.com
For those who can't see the embedded video in this blog, please watch this video on youtube.com
at https://youtu.be/3sFCwP0zWuU