Numerical Simulation of Transient Flow in Products Pipeline

Abstract

In this paper, explicit difference scheme, implicit difference scheme and characteristics method are separately used to simulate the transient flow in products pipeline. The simulation result can be used to prevent water hammer in the pipeline of unsteady situation and to improve the efficiency and safety in oil transmission systems. And then, the stability and accuracy of the three methods are compared by adopting different time steps. For explicit difference method, large fluctuation may occur in case of large time step. For implicit method, the result is weakly affected by time step, only if the relaxation factor selected is reasonable. For characteristics method, the results have a high convergence speed and precision. The results show that, in the situation of valve shut down in terminal, it takes about 1.1×104 seconds to return to a new steady state.