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LNG storage tanks

Post taken from Manufactured landscapes: LNG storage tanks and totally written by PC Gladiator

LNG tanks are the biggest type of storage tanks in the world. LNG stands for Liquid Natural Gas. These tanks are specially designed to maintain the -163 degrees celcius temperature to keep the natural gas liquid. The relatively high cost of production of LNG and the need to store it in expensive cryogenic tanks ( to maintain the low temperatures ) gives the need of big tanks ( larger then in the oil industry ) to minimize costs. LNG tanks are always of double-wall construction with extremely efficient insulation between the walls. Large tanks are low aspect ratio (height to width) and cylindrical in design with a domed roof. There are a lot of safety measures to these tanks because if it escapes from a storage tank or ship, it can quickly vaporize. If this vapor ignites, it can create an immense fireball that would incinerate everything in its path.

The biggest LNG storage tank in the world is situated on Elbas Island near Savannah in the U.S. Below you can see some pictures ( from live search maps birdview) during it's construction:

The world's largest LNG export terminal is called the Sakhalin II terminal and is situated on the Sakhalin island in the Russian Far East. The storage tanks on this project belong to the largests in the world and have a storage capacity of 1.2 mln barrels (190,000 m³ ), The picture below shows what a giant impact these structures have on the once peaceful beach of the village nearby:

Another large LNG terminal is the Bontang LNG Plant in Bontang in Indonesia. The 6 tanks on this site are all more then 80 metres in diameter:

And what about the liquefied natural gas storage tanks at the Yemen L.N.G project which was recently build near (not yet visible in google maps) Balhaf in Yemen. These storage tanks are aboslutely huge as you can see in the pictures below (Click to enlarge)

Here you can see a worker who walks through one of two main storage tanks:

Another large liquid gas storage tank was build in the Senboku LNG terminal II in the harbour of Osaka. This thing was build in 2000 and was the world's largest aboveground LNG storage tank for a long time. This thing is 60 metres high and has diameter of 80 metres.

To view the size of these LNG tanks even better you can enlarge the picture below by clicking on it. The people on top are dwarved by the huge tank. This thing stands here in the harbour of Guangdong in China:

More than mere engineers

We have entered a new era that is changing the role of the engineer on the job and the engineer’s relationship to society. To be successful in the new era of engineering we are going to need to be more than mere engineers. That will be true whether we are a student, a fresh graduate or a senior engineer. The inmediate changes are:

- Eco-responsiblity: Core design specifications will soon require to minimize environmental impact and carbon footprint.
- Information Technologies (IT): Many new software projects may consider using open source software. The Internet also broadens the scale of engineering collaboration. We now have instant access to the thoughts, insights, and feedback of other engineers.
Numerical methods will be unified: finite difference & finite element methods and solid & fluid mechanics. Also the differences between civil, mechanical, computational engineering and physics will fade.
- Communication: The impact as an engineer will increasingly depend on the ability to communicate, collaborate, and participate across the organizations and communities, not just within the engineering department. It is our duty to make the effort to have a continuous dialog with the shareholders of our projects.
- Business skills: Engineering increasingly requires more direct involvement with every aspect of business, including finance, sales and marketing, channels, customer support, and competitive analysis. For example, the most common undergraduate degree for CEOs of Fortune 500 companies is not marketing, sales or finance—it’s engineering, with 20% of all CEOs being engineers; and the richest man in the world -Carlos Slim- got a degree in civil engineering.
- Political action: Engineers are beginning to realize how important it can be to educate and influence those who make public policy decisions (nuclear energy, floods, climate change, data security, etc...) about technology.

Society keeps changing, so society’s needs are changing and enginering should change as well.

Parallelism

Today, material non-linearities, large strains and deformations, high-velocity impact problems are almost routinely treated by sophisticated finite element tools.
The progress in the field would be unthinkable without the availability of computer platforms, especially the parallel ones.
However, parallelism shows a new worrying phenomenon appearing with the implementation of finite element codes on MPP machines: The dependency of results on the number of CPUs used.


The figure represents results of a car crash simulation – a comparison of engine bottom accelerations computed using different numbers of CPUs and a commercial software (taken from a Proper Misuse of Finite Element Analysis by Miloslav Okrouhlik).

We should not believe in a dependence of FE results on the number of CPU’s used and we should admit that a good parallelization of nonlinear dynamic problems can be difficult to master.

Bias cut and the triumph of anisotropy

The bias cut (or byesse cut) is a technique used by designers for cutting clothing to use the greater extensibility in the diagonal direction of the fabric. Woven fabric is more deformable in the bias direction (the Poisson modulus is larger), compared to the on-grain direction.

Every piece of woven fabric has two biases, perpendicular to each other. Non-woven fabrics such as felt or interfacing do not have a bias. If cloth is pulled on one of the bias direction it stretches in that direction and gets shorter in the perperdicular direction. Like this the shear deformation of the cloth accentuates body lines and fits better to the figure. Also, this property facilitates details that require extra elasticity, drapability or flexibility, such as neckties, trims, decorations, boundaries and seams.

French fashion designer Madeleine Vionnet (in the picture below) popularised the bias cut clothes and dominated haute couture in the 1930s setting trends with her sensual dresses worn by stars as Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo. Vionnet's vision of the female form revolutionised modern textile industry.





Note: Based on the story published in Structures or why things don't fall by Prof. J.E. Gordon, 1987.