NUMERICAL CALCULATION OF HYDROCARBON SEPARATION PROCESSES IN BILGE INSTALLATIONS USING VOLUME OF FLUID METHOD

The ballast-bilge installation on board of a commercial ship has many purposes (correction of the position of the center of mass of the vessel, transferring and disposal of liquid ballast overboard, discharging overboard the water bilge collected). These installations are extremely important for transport efficiency and environmental protection.

The paper presents the use of numerical computation for studying the hydrocarbon separation process in bilge installations. The separation process is significant because we must assure that all the hydrocarbons are well isolated so no environmental damage will be done. In the simulation process we were able to visualize all the parameters participating that characterize the process (density, pressure, velocity, turbulent kinetic energy, and turbulent intensity). The volume of fluid was discretized into a structured mesh using uniform quad methods of discretising. These installations are used by both commercial and leisure ships and on on-shore and on off-shore structures. The process of hydrocarbon separation is done in various branches of industry.