Synchronization of velocities in pipeline flow of blended gas

Abstract

We consider the pipeline flow of blended gas. The flow is governed by a coupled system where for each component we have the isothermal Euler equations with an additional velocity coupling term that couples the velocities of the different components. Our motivation is hydrogen blending in natural gas pipelines, which will play a role in the transition to renewable energies. We show that with suitable boundary conditions the velocities of the gas components synchronize exponentially fast, as long as the $L^2$-norm of the synchronization error is outside of a certain interval where the size of the interval is determined by the order of the interaction terms. This indicates that in some cases for a mixture of n components it is justified to use a drift-flux model where it is assumed that all components flow with the same velocity. For the proofs we use an appropriately chosen Lyapunov function which is based upon the idea of relative energy.