Study on the Key Technology of Simulation Training Systems of the Large-Scale and Central Controlled Gas Pipe Network

Due to the different geographical distribution of the natural gas sources and the consumers, the overall trend of the natural gas pipelines in China is from west to east and from north to south, and the patterns of multiple gas sources, multiple consumers, and unified network are formed, the natural gas pipelines are always in a state of high pressure and high pipe inventory. However, the complexity and importance of the large-scale pipeline network bring the centralized dispatching many new requirements, including the control of the entire pipeline network, the operating plans of every pipeline, and the fluctuation of market demands, the pipeline simulation software is often used to solve these problems. Though the application of the modern pipeline simulation system show it has a good accuracy, our study indicates some problems still exist, especially the low efficiency caused by slow computing rate, and its stability and performance cannot meet the practical needs of the large-scale pipeline network system, for it will easily go crash if the time step is longer than 6 seconds, and the complexity of the large-scale natural gas pipeline network is the main reason which cause these problems. In this paper, a new simulation engine is designed and the defects of the modern pipeline simulation software are solved, the simulation engine is based on the following two new methods, the first methods is used to improve the performance and reliability of the system, in which the stations and valve rooms are simplified based on the property of the long-distance natural gas pipeline, and the natural gas pipeline network are divided to reduce the computation scale. Moreover, the performance of the system is also enhanced by the second method, for the pipeline network models and algorithms are improved by adopting parallel computing architecture. The theoretical analysis and application indicates the computation-al scale of the new engine is 23.98% less than the pipeline simulation software in use, and the simulation time step can be increased to 5 minutes for the reliability has been significantly improved, and the computational efficiency of the new engine 2.15 times higher than the famous simulation software when it is used on a 4-core PC. The architecture design of the new simulation engine adopts MVC pattern and factory model, which bring good extendibility and high performance to itself. Additionally, a large-scale natural gas pipeline network with a total length of 9000km (5,592mi), 20 compressor stations, 200 valve rooms and 10 gas storages in China were used in the simulation.