Numerical Simulation of Transient Flow for Gas Pipeline and Tank

Abstract Gas transient flow in pipeline and gas tank is critical in flow assurance. Not only leak detection requires a delicate model to simulate the complicated yet drastically changed phenomena, but also pipeline and tank design in the metering, gathering, and transportation system demands an accurate analysis of gas transient flow, through which efficient, cost-effective operation can be achieved. Traditionally there are two types of approaches to investigate gas transient flow: one is treating gas as ideal gas so that ideal gas law can be applied; another is considering gas as real gas thus gas compressibility factor comes into play. Needless to say, the former method can result in an analytical solution to gas transient flow yet with a deviation from the real gas performance, which is very crucial in daily operation. The latter approach needs numerical method to solve the governing equation, thus leads to unstable issue but with more accurate result. Our literature review indicated that no study considered the effect of changing gas viscosity on the transient flow is available. Therefore, this effect was included in our study. Our investigation showed that viscosity does have significant influence on gas transient flow in pipe and tank leakage evaluation. In this study, a comprehensive evaluation of all variables was done to find out the most important factors in the gas transient flow. Several case studies were used to illustrate the significant of this study. Engineers can do a more reliable evaluation on gas transient flow by following the method we used in our study.