Transients in Engineering Systems: Pipelines Valves and Pumps

Abstract

The work here presented is of direct application to pumping stations for water and oil pipelines with variable physical characteristics. The effects studied include those caused by faults or incorrect operation of valves and the sudden stoppage of the pumping station, during the transport of crude oil, from a coastal storage to a ship.
The use of numerical methods allows modeling the physical installation and simulating the operation of the oil pumping stations as a whole, finding the physical constraints to apply, or the operational conditions to observe, in order to avoid damages to the system components, and also to study safety elements that could avoid damages to the system.
The Method of Characteristics is also implemented for the solution of the system of the hyperbolic equations, with due consideration of the stability limits.
The effect of the water hammer on the pumps is simulated, determining the incidence of the polar moment inertia of the rotating masses and of surface roughness on the flow, as
well as the friction between the fluid and the pipe for different physical conditions.