Fast method for the hydraulic simulation of natural gas pipeline networks based on the divide-and-conquer approach

To apply an implicit method to simulate a natural gas pipeline network, all involved components should be solved in a coupled manner. Therefore, the computation burden and time sharply increase with the network size and complexity rise. To solve this problem, a fast method, which is the decoupled implicit method for efficient network simulation (DIMENS) based on the divide-and-conquer approach, is proposed. In this method, first, the hydraulic variables of all multi-pipeline interconnection nodes are solved; next, the pipeline network is divided into several independent pipelines, and the equations for all pipelines are solved. Compared with the Stoner Pipeline Simulator (SPS), which is a well-known commercial pipeline simulation software worldwide, the DIMENS method yields comparable calculation accuracy with 2.5 times the calculation speed of the SPS. The DIMENS method has strong adaptability to the simulation of the pipeline network, and the computing time in the test example depends linearly on the number of grid nodes or number of pipelines.