Summary
Gas transient flow in a gas pipeline and gas tank is critical in flow assurance. Not only does leak detection require a delicate model to simulate the complicated yet dramatically changed phenomena, but gas-pipeline and gas-tank design in metering, gathering, and transportation systems demands an accurate analysis of gas transient flow, through which efficient, cost-effective operation can be achieved.
Traditionally, there are two types of approaches used to investigate gas transient flow: One involves treating gas as ideal gas so that the ideal-gas law can be applied, and the other considers gas as real gas, allowing the gas-compressibility factor to come into play. Needless to say, the former method can result in an analytical solution to gas transient flow with a deviation from the real-gas performance, which is very crucial in daily operation. The latter approach requires a numerical method to solve the governing equation, leading to instability issues with a more-accurate result. Our literature review indicated that no study considering the effect of changing gas viscosity on the transient flow was available; therefore, this effect was included in our study.
Our investigation showed that viscosity does have a significant influence on gas transient flow in pipe- and tank-leakage evaluation. In this study, a comprehensive evaluation of all variables was performed to determine the most-important factors in the gas transient flow. Several case studies were used to illustrate the significance of this study. Engineers can perform a more-reliable evaluation of gas transient flow by following the method used in our study.