Accommodating Last Minute Changes: Two Phase Separation Performance Validated by CFD

At the last minute, a separation vessel is adapted in response to an unexpected alteration in its original design. While vessel internals are undergoing fabrication in the shop, a revised external piping layout necessitates changes to the overall vessel design. This vessel is compact and its design takes full advantage of its exact geometry. Specifically, the inlet and outlet orientations, to be modified, are critical to the original design. To keep the project on schedule, a new design, created and validated by an expedited computational fluid dynamics (CFD) study, is proposed for installation in 2005. The steps taken to validate the design are described in this paper.