May 21, 2008
Aramco/AFT Joint Presentation at the 24th Pump Users Symposium
Authored by Joe Thorp of Aramco Services Company and Jeff Olsen of Applied Flow Technology, Joe and Jeff presented their paper Application of Numerical Optimization of Seawater Pumping Systems at the 24th International Pump Users Symposium in Houston, Texas, this past April.
The paper describes the optimization of a high pressure sea water pipeline being constructed to increase oil production from an oil field in Khurais, Saudi Arabia. Consisting of approximately 145 km of pipeline and several pumping stations, the optimization addressed both initial operational requirements and planned expansions over ten years and included both first and life cycle costs.
Key to this optimization were the capabilities provided in AFT Mercury, Applied Flow Technology's system optimization software. Starting from a well-engineered design, life cycle cost savings of $104 million was realized demonstrating the significant savings possible from using optimization technology.
The full paper presented at the Pump Symposium can be seen at Optimization of Sea Water Pumping System.
Viewing Output Across Multiple Scenarios
AFT Arrow 4.0 and AFT Fathom 7.0 offer the ability to view text output across multiple scenarios simultaneously, greatly facilitating seeing the differences in results between scenarios.
To view multiple scenario output, open Output Control either from the Analysis menu or, when the Output window is active, by clicking the toobar button, and then selecting the Multi-Scenario tab.
Under Display Type select Selected Scenarios and click the Select Scenarios button to open the Select Scenarios window. Select the scenarios you want to see output for and click OK to return to Output Control where the selected scenarios will now appear in the Scenario Order and Colors list.
Various options are now available to configure multi-scenario output including the order in which the scenarios will appear and to select a background color for individual scenario's output.
You may also choose to show only the scenario name for each set of output or the full scenario name plus the names of its ancestral scenarios.
After configuring multi-scenario output click OK to close Output Control. Depending on how you have run your model previously, you may not immediately see output for all of the selected scenarios.
To minimize file requirements AFT Arrow and AFT Fathom will normally store output in the model file. To display multi-scenario output, output files must be created (.out files). The first time you select multi-scenario output you may not initially see output for all files because the output files have not yet been generated. To do so, re-run the various scenarios by either individually loading and running them or by using the Start Batch Run option on the File menu.