Consequences of uncertain friction for the transport of natural gas through passive networks of pipelines

Abstract

Assuming a pipe-wise constant structure of the friction coefficient in the modeling of natural gas transport through a passive network of pipes via semilinear systems of balance laws with associated linear coupling and boundary conditions, uncertainty in this parameter is quantified by a Markov chain Monte Carlo method. Here, information on the prior distribution is obtained from practitioners. The results are applied to the problem of validating technical feasibility under random exit demand in gas transport networks. In particular, the impact of quantified uncertainty to the probability level of technical feasible exit demand situations is studied by two example networks of small and medium size. The gas transport of the network is modeled by stationary solutions that are steady states of the time dependent semilinear problems.