Composition tracking of natural gas–hydrogen mixtures in pipeline flow using high-resolution schemes.

A transient pipeline flow model with gas composition tracking is solved for studying the operation of a natural gas pipeline under nonisothermal flow conditions in a hydrogen injection scenario. Two approaches to high-resolution pipeline flow modeling based on the WENO scheme are presented and compared with the implicit finite difference method. The high-resolution models are capable of capturing fast fluid transients and tracking the step changes in the composition of the transported mixture. The implicit method assumes the decoupling of the flow model components in order to enhance calculation efficiency. The validation of the composition tracking results against actual gas transmission pipeline indicates that both models exhibit good prediction performance, with normalized root mean square errors of 0.406% and 1.48%, respectively. Under nonisothermal flow conditions, the prediction response of the reduced model against a high-resolution flow model, with respect to the mass and energy linepack, is at most 3.20%. [Display omitted] • Two approaches to high-resolution pipeline flow modeling based on the WENO scheme are presented. • The solutions are capable of capturing fast fluid transients and tracking natural gas-hydrogen mixture composition. • High-resolution solutions are compared to the solution with the implicit finite difference method. • The effect of hydrogen injection on pipeline mass and energy linepack is studied in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]