The China Southwest Gas Gathering and Transportation Network transports natural gas from Chongqing, Shunan, Central Sichuan, Northwest Sichuan, and Northeast Sichuan, to services municipal and industrial utilities in southeast China. Extensive use of pipeline simulation tools is made to manage their complex operations.
An accurate simulation model is essential to analyse current pipeline operation, planning, and network expansion. It plays a crucial role in production, transportation, and delivery services. A physical model for simulation software can be easily constructed for a simple pipeline or with little more effort for transmission lines. Nevertheless, large gas networks are often topologically complex, have physical limitations, occasionally lack data, and are constantly subjected to operational changes and variable flow directions.
In this paper, we present a systematic way of dealing with these challenges. This approach enables us to build an accurate simulation model for a 6000 km (about 3728.23 mi) gas pipeline network, which has over 60 ingress points with different intake pressures and over 120 egress points for different gas delivery requirements, in a short period of time. The model is validated over several actual operational scenarios. This validation includes both steady and transient scenarios. The proposed framework shows its virtue in resilience in dealing with various operations and provides pipeline management precise information needed for daily operation, scheduling, and future expansions.
