please could someone help me out with any useful tip on how to specify the flow efficiency in PIPEPHASE. i am modelling a 9km flowline and it seems the flow efficiency affects pressure drop to a large extent.
The flow efficiency is a "fiddle factor" used to tune the performance of a gas pipeline to fit with the calculations. In effect, it is a correction to the friction factor - maybe that is too much of a generalisation?
You can read about it in "A Tutorial on Pipe Flow Equations" by Donald W Schroeder. See
In my opinion it belongs to the past and with "modern" correlations you do not need this. Unfortunately I do not know the PIPEPHASE program. If it offers you a choice of models, change it to something more modern. Equations like "Panhandle A" seem to be still used in the natural gas industry, but they are just special cases of the general equations you will find in modern fluids handbooks. Maybe I am out of line, but I would drop all this historical stuff and use the modern standards. Any comments from people in the natural gas industry?
Try this:
access the device data worksheet for the referenced link via the GUI.
by hitting the edit button on this worksheet, Pipephase comes up with all the link data (supplied and default). One of these is the flow efficiency expressed as a percentage which can then be typed in.