Pressure Transients and Control in Liquid Propane Caverns

This paper shows how a very simple model of the process dynamics of a LPG cavern may be developed, and demonstrates the applicability of this model. The model is used to simulate the consequences of malfunctioning control equipment during loading of the cavern, to design a simple feed forward control strategy for the feed temperature and to estimate the model parameters from real plant experiments. From these experiments the heat transfer from the vapor phase to the rock and the heat conductivity of the rock itself are estimated. The parameters so obtained are plausible and may be used for further simulations or design and evaluation of similar caverns. The results of the model fitting show that the material balance is accurate within less than 1% while the energy balance is accurate to withon 0.07oC or about 3% of the peak value of the temperature transient during loading