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Fresh cooling water system best practices in a modern LNG facility.

Number: 90

Author(s) : HOLT C., HE M., MOSSOLLY M., ILANGOVAN R., RODRIGUEZ J. L.

Summary

The NFXP NFE project desalinates seawater to meet facility cooling demand. This water primarily removes heat from the refrigeration process of four mega trains. Heat is conveyed through the world’s largest induced-draft cooling tower system with a combined length of over one kilometer. Water supply to the four trains is provided by 18 vertical main pumps and eight vertical secondary pumps. The NFE pumps are single stage vertically suspended centrifugal types. Vertically suspended pumps offer space savings and lower overall installation costs when directly integrated within a cooling tower basin versus multistage horizontal centrifugal pumps. However, vertically suspended pumps have different engineering challenges when compared with horizontal pumps requiring additional engineering and verification throughout the design, construction,
commissioning, and start-up phases of a project. Due to its overhung nature, a vertically suspended pump may experience unacceptable vibration that may arise from pump pit and basin geometry, rotordynamic, reed frequency excitation, and piping arrangement.
These pumps are a step-out within industry regarding head and power at rated flow. Each pump is rated at 54 m of head and 4.5 MW of power at 24,000 m3/hr flow. With a total installed base of 81 MW of pumping power and 384,000 m3/hr supply to four LNG trains (enough to supply a city of 3.3 million residents), this technology, integrated with a cooling tower, requires additional engineering to ensure successful operation at start-up and reliability beyond.
This poster discusses the three key design elements along with associated analyses and tests for the cooling water pump system: (1) pump and pump pit bay (including tower basin) hydraulic studies and scale model tests, (2) a machine design audit that focuses on the predicted lateral, torsional, and structural rotordynamic behavior of the pump, and (3) factory acceptance rotordynamic verification, site hammer tests of the upper and lower casing structural reed frequencies, and rotordynamic remodelling results.
These three design elements provide valuable insights to the design and long-term reliable performance of the cooling water system. The authors argue that these three analyses and verification elements should always be systematically employed in any large vertically suspended pump system. For large vertically suspended pumps, the verification of good engineering design practices is important to prevent negative schedule impact, start-up issues, and to ensure long term reliability.

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Details

  • Original title: Fresh cooling water system best practices in a modern LNG facility.
  • Record ID : 30034703
  • Languages: English
  • Subject: Technology
  • Source: 21st International Conference & Exhibition on Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG2026)
  • Publication date: 2026/02/05

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