NCSA and Alliance researchers provide Shell Oil Company with code and expertise for modeling refining and production equipment—and in less than a week set up the first Linux cluster in Shell's oil products and chemicals research areas.

Vacuum flashers—they almost sound made up. Something a movie fighter pilot barks about being damaged in a dogfight. Something that allows a DeLorean to travel through time.

Outside the movies, however, vacuum flashers are a critical, elementary part of many applications in the petroleum and chemical industry. These devices are nothing more than vessels in which varying atmospheric pressure allows products to be distilled from another substance. Vacuum distillation prevents decomposition at the point of vaporization, and the separation into components yields useful end products or elements that can be used in other processes.

Regardless of the initial substance and the eventual products, vacuum flashers are home to a wicked fluid dynamics environment. Liquids and gases flowing among one another trigger dramatic fluctuations in pressure and velocity—fluctuations we know as turbulence. Understanding this turbulence, its impact, and methods of combating it is not only a great research challenge. It will also impact the industrial bottom line by both reducing the deterioration of vacuum flashers and increasing the units' efficiency.
		GenIDLEST software interface. Enlarge image.

In an effort to come to terms with turbulence, NCSA recently completed an extensive project with Shell Oil Company. Working under the auspices of NCSA's Private Sector Program, a research team modeled a vacuum flasher that Shell uses in chemical manufacturing. The team used an NCSA massively parallel computational fluid dynamics code known as GenIDLEST to capture with remarkable precision both the complex geometry of the vessel and the time-dependent characteristics of the turbulent flows. While they were at it, the team set up a Linux computing cluster dedicated to Shell computational fluid dynamics research. With standardized software that is now part of the Alliance's Cluster-in-a-Box software package and off-the-shelf computers, the cluster was up and running in a matter of days.

"We spend a lot of money maintaining commercial tools for our research and technical service projects," says Raghu Menon, a Shell researcher who has collaborated with NCSA for years and is Shell's principal investigator on the application. "But problems like modeling time-dependent turbulence accurately and solutions like the new Linux cluster require relationships like that with NCSA. This relationship is very exciting. The power is apparent."

Access Online | Posted 2-12-2002