The Simulation Of The Impact Of Natural Gas Pipeline Parameters On The Leakage Accident

As a kind of clean and efficient new energy and chemical raw material, natural gas playsan important role in improving the daily life, supporting national economic development andprotecting the environment. The domestic and international exploration and development ofnatural gas are constantly increasing along with the rapid growth of natural gas used in theaspects of production, living and transportation. Therefore as an efficient and safe modes oftransport, pipeline transport has developed increasingly rapid in recent years, while thespilling problem has became the research emphasis at the same time.Such accidents can be resolved in a short period of time with the use of computationalfluid dynamics numerical simulation softwares, which were efficient and reliable. In manyexisting researches, the influence of atmospheric environmental conditions on the leakageaccidents have been investigated a lot. In order to improve the influencing factors of suchincidents, this paper put the research emphasis on pipe parameters itself. With the pip data ofwest-east gas pipeline2and the Shanxi-Beijing gas pipeline engineering, comparativesimulation was carried out with the initial setting of12MPa and6.4MPa for pressure,300Kand273.15K for temperature,1.2m and0.66m for pipe diameter and0.1m and0.05m forthe leakage hole diameter, respectively.In this paper, preprocessor Gambit, solver FLUENT and post-processing softwareTecplot were utilized. The simulation results showed that, among the gas pipeline parameters,transport pressure had the greatest influence on the leakage pressure and velocity, which werein direct proportion. However, the increase of transport temperature or transport pipe diametercan lead to a decreasing tendency of the leak port stress. Moreover, leakage speed generallyincreases as the rise of the leakage pressure, and only in the case that the temperature increased significantly, the leaking speed can increase when leakage pressure reduces.Through comprehensive comparison, we can find that the risk of leakage accident and thedamage to the environment can be minimized if large diameter pipeline and low pressureconditions were adopted to transport natural gas.