Prediction of pressurizing time for commissioning of natural gas pipeline

During commissioning, a natural gas pipeline should be pressurized in stages to reach its operation pressure, and certain time should be reserved for stabilization of pressure and leakage detection upon completion of pressurizing at each stage. Therefore, it is necessary to predict the pressurizing time of each stage. In this paper, based on the BWRS equation, the software predicting the pressurizing time is developed, which can be used for natural gas pipelines with different diameters, target pressures and temperament components. This software is applied to China-Myanmar Gas Pipeline (Ruili-Yuxi section) for predicting the pressurizing time from 1 MPa to 3 MPa, revealing the results nearly matching the actual pressurizing time and the maximum deviation of less than 4 h. The detailed analysis of factors like temperature, wall thickness and elevation shows that the temperature has a larger influence on predicted pressurizing time, while the pressurizing time predicted by daily mean temperature is more close to the measured value.