With more than 100 submissions and the only application involving computational fluid dynamics (CFD), the project won first prize in the "Alliance with an External Party" category as part of this year's BG Group Chief Executive Innovation Awards. The Awards are designed to recognize teams that demonstrate unique technology applications to realize material business benefits and provide a new platform to showcase examples of technological development.

"This award is an excellent example of innovation in the use of ANSYS CFX with tangible benefits to our customers," said Jim Cashman, president and CEO at ANSYS, Inc. "It is a privilege to work alongside dynamic leading companies like Genesis Oil &Gas Consultants and BG Group, and to receive such an impressive award for the work everyone contributed to this project."

The team from ANSYS CFX, Justin Penrose and Phil Stopford, used transient adaptive meshing in ANSYS CFX-5 to model two-phase flow within the Hannibal Plant "slug-catcher." The slug-catcher is a complex network of pipes used to separate gas from liquid flow and is used to protect the processing facilities from liquid surges that can come ashore from the 120 km offshore pipeline. The performance and capacity of the slug-catcher were quantified indicating that offshore gas production could be increased substantially without having to install a new slug catcher, a CAPEX saving in the order of $25 million.

"By leveraging the worldwide experience of both Genesis and ANSYS, Inc., we identified applicable technologies and solutions to the challenges we faced," said Derek Fisher, president at BG Tunisia. "BG Group is pleased that our strategic relationship with these dynamic companies enabled the project team to accurately determine a resolution to the slug catcher. Winning the award is a tribute to the teamwork displayed by the staff of both companies in delivering a world-class solution to BG Group."

BG Group employed Genesis to assess the cost of increasing the pipeline capacity from the offshore Miskar field so that they can increase production volumes. Genesis realized that the slug catcher could be the major bottleneck in the system, and therefore, approached ANSYS, Inc. to model the system using CFD.

"This is our first project with Genesis, and we all are very pleased with the results," said Ian Jones, head of CFX Technical Services at ANSYS, Inc. "The ability to use transient mesh adaption was crucial because it enabled the team to keep the total mesh size small enough to get solutions within two days on four processors. They used the inhomogeneous Eulerian multiphase model so that they could represent liquid spray droplets as well as separated (free surface) flow. Modeling of multiphase flow is a specialty of ANSYS CFX software."