Application of Factorial Design to Operability Improvements of Saint-Fergus Gas Terminal

With the development of Personal Computers (PC) more and more calculating power is at the disposal of Engineers. Sophisticated software now make it possible to access a wealth of information that could not be conceived just a few years ago. For the Process Engineer, the Thermodynamic packages such as PRO2 of Siinsci or HYSIM of Hyprotech give very quick steady state information about a unit or plant.The difficulty arises when an engineer must assimilate the vast amount of produced data to draw conclusions in an a digestible manner for any other user.As an example, if the engineer is asked to identify the bottlenecks of a gas plant when it is operating within a given range of the following variables• Feed Composition• Arrival Pressure• Temperature of Dew Point ControlIt is fairly simple to watch the behaviour of the plant for one possible bottleneck. Keeping an eye on two is already more difficult, the task becomes almost impossible with five or more!Factorial Design is a convenient method to approach the problem as it makes the engineer "Data Intelligent" in that he gets several simulations to work at a time for him to get an overview of how the plant is running.TOTAL OIL MARINE has used this technique very successfully for numerous applications on its units, particularly on the Saint-Fergus gas plant.