Abstract
The main objective of this paper is to describe the methodic and the software developed by authors, which has aimed to simulate operation modes of a centrifugal gas compressor and associated equipment. In this paper, the computer-based design and the analysis of control systems for centrifugal gas compressors are presented. The structure of the mathematical models and the solution methods are discussed. A Visual Basic-based application has been built to solve the system dynamics and to generate the model in installation executable format. The application allows simulating the behavior of a gas compression network through an individual simulation of each component in the network like gas compressor, valve, heat-exchanger, gas-liquid separator, pipe line. Flow through the system elements is modeled as a multi-component compressible gas flow and the Redlich-Kwong Equation of State is used to solve the mass conservation equation. Based on the centrifugal gas compressor theory an anti-surge control strategy has been applied to the model in order to predict and control surge cases. The one-stage gas compression model has been used to verify how the software responds to changes in the suction and discharge conditions.