Numerical Simulation of Transient Compressible Flow in Natural Gas long Transmission Pipelines Using a Suitable Parallel Algorithm

Analysis of natural gas transient flow in transmission pipelines is one of the most important issues in the gas industry. Despite the previous studies, the accuracy and the computational time have yet considered as two important challenges in this field. In this paper, a parallel algorithm for numerical simulation of isothermal and non-isothermal gas flows is presented. Numerical analysis of the flow is performed using the implicit Steger-Warming flux vector splitting method. For parallelization, the computer program has been parallelized using Message Passing Interface library. In order to demonstrate the capabilities of the developed computer program, the flow inside two pipelines with different conditions is solved, and the results are validated. Then, some factors such as the computational time, reduction of the time, and the speed up criteria are obtained to demonstrate the computational efficiency of the proposed method. The results show that parallel processing method can significantly reduce computational time of natural gas flow in long transmission pipelines. Moreover, it is shown that application of this approach on the fine computational grids is more efficient than on the coarse grids.