Abstract
The rapid development of natural gas pipelines has highlighted the need to utilize SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) system data. In this paper, a heat transfer model of a natural gas pipeline based on data feature extraction and first principle models, which makes full use of the measured temperatures at each end of the pipeline, is proposed. Three methods, the NARX neural network (nonlinear autoregressive neural network with exogenous inputs), time series decomposition, and system identification, were used to model the changes of gas temperatures of the pipeline. The NARX neural network method uses a cyclic neural network to directly model the relationship of temperature between the start and the end of the pipeline. The measured temperature series at the pipeline inlet and outlet were decomposed into trend items, fluctuation items, and noise items based on the time series decomposition method. Then the three items were fitted separately and combined to form a new temperature prediction series. The system identification method constructed the first-order and second-order transfer function to model the temperature. The simulation of the three data-driven models was compared with those of the physics-based simulation models. The results showed that the data-driven model has great advantages over the physics-based simulation models in both accuracy and efficiency. The proposed models are more suitable for applications such as online simulation and state observation of long-distance natural gas pipelines.