A Fully-Coupled Transient Model for Predicting Interface Contamination in Product Pipelines

This work presents a coupled fluid transient model to describe the mixing phenomenon arising in batch transfers in petroleum pipelines. The concentration evolution described by the dispersion of matter at the products’ interface is properly taken into account on the mass and momentum balance equations for the mixture as a whole. The resulting mathematical problem is formed by a system of non-linear partial differential equations which is solved by means of an operator splitting technique, combined with a Glimm’s scheme and predictor-corrector method. The influence of stopping the line during a batch transfer on the mixing volume is preliminarily analyzed for a particular batch.