Safety Approval of SMR
Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) announced that the company recently completed a single mixed refrigerant (SMR) test bed facility that re-liquefies vaporized gas from an LNG tanker at its headquarters in Ulsan and received its safety approval from Korea Gas Safety Corporation.
The shipbuilder landed orders for four LNG tankers from Greece and Russia shipping companies last year. The system is expected to go into the four LNG tankers for the first time.
SMR is a technology developed by Hyundai Heavy Industries jointly with LGE (Liquid Gas Equipment), a gas processing engineering company in the United Kingdom. SMR is characterized by the fact that the technology can re-liquefy evaporative gas generated from LNG tankers 100 percent for the first time in the world by putting mixed refrigerants to good use.
This system boosts energy efficiency up to 40% compared to the Complete Re-Liquefaction System based on a single refrigerate introduced by Hyundai Heavy Industries in 2016, reducing facility sizes and improving operational convenience.
In particular, the new technological breakthrough is expected to open up the Low BOR era for LNG tankers by lowering an LNG boil-off rate (BOR), which occurs during operation close to 0.017%, which is three times lower than existing LNG partial liquefaction systems’ LNG BORs.
Meanwhile, the Hyundai Heavy Industries Group received orders for a total of 15 LNG tankers (including seven optional units) last year, receiving the recognition of its LNG tanker technology from European and American energy companies such as Total and Enel. The order volume accounts for more than 40 percent of all orders for large LNG tankers in the world.