Benefits and Limitations of Simplified Transient Gas Flow Formulations

TL;DR

This paper explores simplified linear models for transient gas flow in pipelines, analyzing their accuracy and potential for improving control optimization in large gas networks.

Contribution

It introduces new simplified linear formulations for transient gas flow and evaluates their accuracy using real-world data, addressing current modeling limitations.

Findings

Simplified models reduce computational complexity.

Empirical analysis shows acceptable error margins.

Potential for improved real-time control applications.

Abstract

Although intensively studied in recent years, the optimization of the transient (time-dependent) control of large real-world gas networks is still out of reach for current state-of-the-art approaches. For this reason, we present further simplifications of the commonly used model, which lead to a linear description of the gas flow on pipelines. In an empirical analysis of real-world data, we investigate the properties of the involved quantities and evaluate the errors made by our simplification.