An Asymptotic-Preserving Scheme for Isentropic Flow in Pipe Networks

Abstract: We consider the simulation of isentropic flow in pipelines and pipe networks. Standard operating conditions in pipe networks suggest an emphasis to simulate low Mach and high friction regimes -- however, the system is stiff in these regimes and conventional explicit approximation techniques prove quite costly and often impractical. To combat these inefficiencies, we develop a novel asymptotic-preserving scheme that is uniformly consistent and stable for all Mach regimes. The proposed method for a single pipeline follows the flux splitting suggested in [Haack et al., Commun. Comput. Phys., 12 (2012), pp. 955--980], in which the flux is separated into stiff and non-stiff portions then discretized in time using an implicit-explicit approach. The non-stiff part is advanced in time by an explicit hyperbolic solver; we opt for the second-order central-upwind finite volume scheme. The stiff portion is advanced in time implicitly using an approach based on Rosenbrock-type Runge-Kutta methods, which ultimately reduces this implicit stage to a discretization of a linear elliptic equation. To extend to full pipe networks, the scheme on a single pipeline is paired with coupling conditions defined at pipe-to-pipe intersections to ensure a mathematically well-posed problem. We show that the coupling conditions remain well-posed in the low Mach/high friction limit -- which, when used to define the ghost cells of each pipeline, results in a method that is accurate across these intersections in all regimes. The proposed method is tested on several numerical examples and produces accurate, non-oscillatory results with run times independent of the Mach number.