(599ak) New Approach to Gas Hydraulics Calculations

Mesude Ozturk, Lutfiye Hacioglu  and *Miguel Bagajewicz

School of Chemical Engineering and Material Science, University of Oklahoma

100 East Boyd Street, T-335 – Norman, OK 73019-0628 USA

        *corresponding author

Abstract

The methods used by engineers to evaluate gas-hydraulics in pipelines have not changed in the last few decades. Indeed, several books recommends the usage of equations developed several years ago, when computers were not available, like Modified Colebrook-White, AGA, Panhandle A and B, Weymouth, etc.  With the advance of computers, piping gas hydraulics can in principle be computed very accurately integrating numerically differential forms of the Bernoulli equation, thus rendering all approximate existing formulas for pressure drop rather inadequate.  In fact, when accurate calculations are compared to the results rendered by these corelations large deviations are observed.  In this paper we use an accurate implementation of pressure drop to determine the error of the different existing formulas. We also propose a way of constructing a more accurate analytical formula to replace existing correlations that can also be useful in operations optimization, pipeline design using mathematical programming, leak detection, among other uses. Finally, we report the errors of our formula and compare with others.