Investigation on friction models for simulation of pipeline filling transients

ABSTRACT

The assumption of steady friction model is usually adopted for modelling of pipeline filling. To investigate the effect of different friction models on filling transients, the steady, quasi-steady and unsteady friction models are introduced when the filling processes are simulated in a reservoir-valve-pipeline system. The relevance of three friction models during pipeline filling is studied under different driving heads, valve opening times and pipe sizes. The numerical explorations show that the discrepancies in filling results between the quasi-steady friction model and the unsteady friction model are negligible but the discrepancies between the quasi-steady (or unsteady) friction model and steady friction model increase with the decrease in driving head and the increase in valve opening time in a small scale pipeline. Moreover, the importance of friction models would not be obvious when the pipe size increases gradually. This implies that one can use almost any reasonable friction model during rapid filling in a large scale pipeline.

Keywords:

• Filling process
• friction model
• hydraulic transient
• interface tracking method
• pipelines

Additional information

Funding

This work was partly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 51621061 and 51779258], and the National Science and Technology Support Project of China [grant number 2015BAD20B01].