A Tool for the Simulation of Turbo-Machine Auxiliary Lubrication Plants

The reliability and safety of large turbo-machinery systems used in the oil and gas industries are heavily affected by the efficiency of the lubrication plant. In particular, hazard and operability (HAZOP) analyses are often performed using piping and instrumentation diagrams (P&ID; according to regulations in force, ISO 14617). Usually, these analyses are time-consuming and affected by potentially dangerous errors. In this work, a tool for the mono-dimensional simulation of thermal hydraulic plants is presented and applied to the analysis of safety-relevant components of compressor and pumping units, such as the lubrication circuits. Compared to known commercial products, the proposed tool is optimised for fixed step solvers in order to make real-time (RT) integration easier. The proposed tool defines a general approach, and can be used as a SimScape-Simulink library of thermal-hydraulic components (designed according to the P&ID definitions). Another interesting feature of the tool is the automatic scheme generation, where the Simulink model can be automatically generated by P&ID schemes.