NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF THE GAS FLOW IN PIPELINES USING THE FLUX-CORRECTED TRANSPORT METHOD
Carina Nogueira Sondermann1; Rodrigo Augusto Camara Patrício1; Aline Barbosa Figueiredo1; Renan Martins Baptista2; Felipe Bastos de Freitas Rachid3; Gustavo Cesar Rachid Bodstein1
1 Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; 2 PETROBRAS/CENPES; 3 Fluminense Federal University
doi:10.20906/CPS/COB-2015-1556
Resumo
The operation of gas pipelines is a very important task, particularly in the oil and chemical industries. Pipeline operations for the transport of gases are usually subject to specific events, such as the opening and closing of valves, the passage of PIGs in the interior of the pipeline and the occurrence of leaks in the system, to say the least. Because the gas-pipeline flow subject to these events is very complex, its accurate and robust numerical prediction is still a current research topic. In order to have computer codes capable of performing these numerical simulations correctly, it is necessary first to have a reliable numerical code that calculates the basic flow accurately, under transient and steady-state conditions. The analysis of this problem involves the mathematical modeling of the fluid flow and the choice of the numerical techniques to be used to solve the system of partial differential equations with the corresponding initial and boundary conditions. Bearing in mind future applications to two-phase flows, we describe in this paper a one-dimensional mathematical model and its associated numerical method to calculate the gas flow inside a pipeline. The model is discretized within the finite-volume framework and is solved using the Flux-Corrected Transport (FCT) method, which is second-order in space. We formulate the problem as an initial-boundary value problem of the hyperbolic type. We show a few validation tests and present results for the distributions of pressure and velocity along the pipe, compared to other results available in the literature.
Palavras-chave: gas-flow pipelines; transient flow in pipelines; flux-corrected transport method; numerical simulation; petroleum engineering