Title : Simulation and experimental verification of pump stoppage transients in oil and gas pipeline systems using PEM
Abstract:
Sudden pump stoppages in oil and gas pipeline systems pose significant operational challenges, leading to pressure surges, cavitation, gas release, and transient instabilities. These events can cause mechanical failures, reduced operational efficiency, and safety risks, particularly in high-pressure environments such as offshore pipelines, crude oil transport systems, LNG facilities, and refinery networks. Accurately predicting transient hydraulic behavior is crucial for pipeline integrity management, surge protection design, and real-time operational monitoring. Traditional numerical methods, including the Method of Characteristics (MOC) and the Finite Difference Method (FDM), often suffer from interpolation errors, numerical diffusion, and stability issues, making them less effective for complex transient events. Advanced techniques such as Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) and the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) offer higher accuracy but are computationally expensive and impractical for real-time industrial applications. This study introduces and experimentally validates the Post-Extrapolation Method (PEM), a novel numerical approach designed to eliminate interpolation errors, enhance computational efficiency, and improve numerical stability in oil and gas pipeline simulations. The method is tested against experimental data obtained from a centrifugal pump-driven pipeline system, where sudden stoppage conditions were induced to observe pressure transients, cavitation effects, and gas release phenomena. High-frequency pressure transducers and real-time data acquisition systems (DAQs) were used for validation.
The results demonstrate that PEM achieves an accuracy exceeding 98%, with deviations of less than 2% compared to experimental results, significantly outperforming MOC and FDM. Furthermore, PEM reduces computational time by over 40%, making it ideal for real-time predictive maintenance and transient event analysis in oil and gas pipelines. A detailed assessment of gas release dynamics highlights its impact on pressure wave attenuation, cavitation severity, and multiphase flow stability, underscoring the need for accurate two-phase flow modeling in transient simulations. This study provides a validated, computationally efficient framework for transient flow modeling in onshore and offshore oil and gas pipeline networks. The findings offer direct industrial applications in:
- Pipeline surge protection and transient control in crude oil, natural gas, and LNG transport systems.
- Optimizing emergency shutdown (ESD) procedures to mitigate sudden pump failures.
- Real-time monitoring and predictive maintenance for oil and gas infrastructure.
- Enhancing offshore pipeline integrity by improving transient flow prediction and cavitation modeling
