Integration of unsteady friction models in pipe flow simulations

Abstract

Various approaches to integrate instantaneous acceleration models are examined. The basic physical model consists of the one-phase flow water hammer equations with the unsteady wall friction model of Brunone. The numerical scheme is based on characteristic upwind finite differences, representing an extension of the Godunov schemes to the non-conservative hyperbolic equations. The most accurate solutions result from the basic version of this method, which takes into account the effects of spatial and temporal derivatives of the unsteady friction term on the eigenvalues of the hyperbolic equations. A convergence analysis shows that second-order accuracy is obtained on smooth solutions with this approach, but only if the discontinuity in the unsteady friction correlation is removed. Two simpler numerical schemes treat the unsteady friction term as a source term and neglect its influence on the eigenvalues. The results obtained with the simplified schemes converge to the exact solutions, but exhibit larger numerical diffusivity than the basic version of the method.

Keywords:

• Characteristic upwind method
• pipe flow
• unsteady friction models
• water hammer
• 1D simulation