Publications

A model hierarchy that is based on the one-dimensional isothermal Euler equations of fluid dynamics is used for the simulation and optimisation of gas flow through a pipeline network. Adaptive refinement strategies have the aim of bringing the simulation error below a prescribed tolerance while keeping the computational costs low. While spatial and temporal stepsize adaptivity is well studied in the literature, model adaptivity is a new field of research. The problem of finding an optimal refinement strategy that combines these three types of adaptivity is a generalisation of the unbounded knapsack problem. A refinement strategy that is currently used in gas flow simulation software is compared to two novel greedy-like strategies. Both a theoretical experiment and a realistic gas flow simulation show that the novel strategies significantly outperform the current refinement strategy with respect to the computational cost incurred.

The minimization of operation costs for natural gas transport networks is studied. Based on a recently developed model hierarchy ranging from detailed models of instationary partial differential equations with temperature dependence to highly simplified algebraic equations, modeling and discretization error estimates are presented to control the overall error in an optimization method for stationary and isothermal gas flows. The error control is realized by switching to more detailed models or finer discretizations if necessary to guarantee that a prescribed model and discretization error tolerance is satisfied in the end. We prove convergence of the adaptively controlled optimization method and illustrate the new approach with numerical examples.

In the simulation and optimization of gas flow in a pipeline network, a hierarchy of models is used that employs different formulations of the Euler equations. While the optimization is performed on piecewise linear models, the flow simulation is based on the simulation of one to three dimensional Euler equations including the temperature distributions. To decide which model class in the hierarchy is adequate to achieve a desired accuracy, this paper presents an error and perturbation analysis for a two level model hierarchy including the isothermal Euler equations in semilinear form and the stationary Euler equations in purely algebraic form. The focus of the work is on the effect of data uncertainty, discretization and rounding errors in the numerical simulation of these models and their interaction. Two simple discretization schemes for the semilinear model are compared with respect to their conditioning and temporal stepsizes are determined for which a well-conditioned problem is obtained. The results are based on new componentwise relative condition numbers for the solution of nonlinear systems of equations. Moreover, the model error between the semilinear and the algebraic model is computed, the maximum pipeline length is determined for which the algebraic model can be used safely, and a condition is derived for which the isothermal model is adequate.