Efficient Numerical Methods for Gas Network Modeling and Simulation

Yue Qiu, Sara Grundel, Martin Stoll, Peter Benner

Published 2018-07-18Version 1

We study the modeling and simulation of gas pipeline networks, with a focus on fast numerical methods for the simulation of transient dynamics. The obtained mathematical model of the underlying network is represented by a nonlinear differential algebraic equation (DAE). By introducing the concept of \textit{long pipes}, we can reduce the dimension of the algebraic constraints in the resulting DAEs. We introduce a so-called \textit{flow direction following} (FDF) ordering technique to order the \textit{long pipes} of the network, and we obtain a block lower-triangular matrix structure of the $(1, 1)$ block for the system matrix of the DAE model. We further exploit such a matrix structure in the DAE model and propose an efficient preconditioner for the fast simulation of the network. We test our numerical methods on benchmark problems of (well-)known gas networks and the numerical results show the advantage of our methods.