The Evolution and Development Trends of LNG Loading and Unloading Arms

In recent years, the rapid growth in demand for liquefied natural gas (LNG) has brought significant challenges and opportunities to LNG storage and transportation technologies. As critical equipment for LNG loading operations, marine and land-based LNG loading and unloading arms play a vital role in improving LNG storage and transportation efficiency and ensuring safety performance. By extensively collecting relevant domestic and international literature, technical standards, and engineering cases, systematically reviewing and analyzing existing achievements, and engaging with technical personnel from related enterprises, the current development status of marine and land-based LNG loading and unloading arms is introduced from multiple perspectives, including overall structure, sealing technology, safety protection devices, and intelligent and automated development. This paper highlights trajectory planning and image processing involved in the automatic docking technology. Marine loading/unloading arms need to operate in high-humidity, high-corrosion, and even extreme weather conditions. In the future, they should further enhance stability in marine high-corrosion environments and improve anti-overturning capability under extreme conditions by simplifying mechanical structures, developing new balancing systems, and using low-temperature-resistant alloy materials. Land-based loading and unloading arms focus on multi-vehicle parallel operations, improving operational efficiency through simplified mechanical structures, integrated intelligent positioning systems, and adaptive control algorithms.