Numerical prediction of developing flow in gas pipelines

Abstract

Paper presented at the 5th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, South Africa, 1-4 July, 2007.

In this paper the numerical modeling of the dynamic behavior of compressible gas flow is investigated in pipelines. The numerical simulation is performed by solving the coupled conservation form of the governing equations for twodimensional, laminar, viscous, supersonic flow in developing region under different thermal boundary conditions. The numerical procedure is a finite-volume based finite-element method applied on unstructured grids. The convection terms are discretized by well-defined Roe Method and diffusion terms by a Galerkin finite element formulation. The temporal terms are evaluated based on an explicit fourth order Runge-Kutta scheme. The results indicate that heating the gas flow leads to an increase in pressure loss. In the other words, cooling the gas flow leads to decrease the pressure drop or power consumption of booster pressure station. Furthermore, change in the gas viscosity has considerable effects on the flow quantities such as pressure loss and friction factor.