Surge protection of centrifugal compressors using advanced anti-surge control system

Abstract

Centrifugal Compressors (CCs) are widely used equipment to transport the natural gas over long-distance pipelines from the gas processing facility to end consumers. Surge protection is of vital importance for such compressors to avoid costly damage to machine and production loss due to process interruption. In this paper, the dynamic behaviour of CCs has been studied during four critical scenarios: high header pressure, low suction pressure, startup of the new unit, and emergency shutdown of the unit. The dynamic simulation has been carried out using HYSYS software and validated with an industrial scale CC plant. The advanced Anti-Surge Control (ASC) consists of a split PID control in contrast to conventional PID control. The simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of advanced ASC over a conventional one for the severe surge in the event of high header pressure and low suction pressure. The occurrence of surge during start-up and the emergency shutdown was handled with the full open operation of the Anti-Surge Valve (ASV). The proposed algorithm has proved successful in protecting the compressor during fast transients of the operating point towards the surge limit line. The study is significant for the oil and gas plants and other process industry professionals for designing effective ASC systems.