Transient gas pipeline flow: analytical examples, numerical simulation and a comparison to the quasi-static approach

Abstract The operation of gas pipeline flow with high pressure and small Mach numbers allows to model the flow by a semilinear hyperbolic system of partial differential equations. In this paper we present a number of transient and stationary analytical solutions of this model. They are used to discuss and clarify why a PDE model is necessary to handle certain dynamic situations in the operation of gas transportation networks. We show that adequate numerical discretizations can capture the dynamical behavior sufficiently accurate. We also present examples that show that in certain cases an optimization approach that is based on multi-period optimization of steady states does not lead to approximations that converge to the optimal state.