A novel approach integrating the method of characteristics with large time-step scheme (MOC-LTS) for efficient transient flow simulation in liquid pipelines

Abstract

Water hammer incidents pose a significant risk to the safety and stability of pipeline operations. Therefore, rapid and precise transient flow simulation is essential for efficiently developing scientific water hammer control strategies. Nevertheless, the prevailing transient flow simulation methods for liquid pipelines predominantly employ explicit schemes to solve transient flow control equations, necessitating adherence to the stability criterion of Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy (CFL) ≤ 1. This results in limited time step size, which in turn constrains computational efficiency, particularly when simulating hydraulic behavior in large-scale pipeline networks. In this paper, a novel approach integrating the method of characteristics (MOC) with a large time-step scheme (LTS) is proposed to enable rapid and accurate simulation of transient flow in liquid pipelines. The proposed approach discretizes the computational domain into contiguous control volumes, ategorizing them as either boundary or internal control volumes depending on whether they are affected by boundary conditions within a large time step. For internal control volumes, an LTS scheme based on the first-order Godunov format is employed to improve computational efficiency. For boundary control volumes, MOC is applied iteratively to accurately capture boundary dynamics until the simulated time matches that of the internal control volumes. Quantitative analysis is conducted to verify the performance of the proposed approach. The results confirm that the proposed approach outperforms the MOC in computational efficiency while maintaining minimal accuracy loss.