Sudden closure or opening of valve gives rise to a very high inertia pressure within the pipe line. This is usually done by devices such as valves, pumps or any other mechanical equipment which can disturb the steady state flow conditions can trigger oscillations of flow from laminar region to turbulent region. Precautions must be taken to handle these transient events and it can lead to catastrophic events. For example, a hydroelectric power plant in Russia which is named as Sayano-Shushenskaya (2009) was completely destroyed due to sudden stoppage of one of its turbines. At the end of this event, 76 people lost their lives and approximately $310 million worth of damage was inflicted.
Previous solutions to flow oscillation problems in pipes, assumed flow to be laminar always or turbulent always. Whereas no surge flow is ever turbulent always, it will also be laminar sometimes. This would require a numerical approach for solving second order differential equations, which is lengthy to achieve manually due to its iterative computations. Hence, there is need for a suitable algorithm that can treat flow that oscillate between laminar and turbulent regimes.
The aim of this research is to develop an effective numerical method that can be used to efficiently compute surges in pipes due to valve connecting two reservoirs being rapidly opened, using a computer program developed in the Python environment.
Unsteady-flow situations are more difficult to analyze than steady-flow situations. The Bernoulli equation is not applicable and the equation of motion leads to a differential equations for the velocity or pressure or head as a function of time. Numerical and graphical methods are frequently resorted to, with the use of analog and digital computers to speed up the process of finding solutions.
There is no doubt that this program developed would assist students, researchers and practicing engineers in the industry in surge computations.