Omid Mansourzadeh - Department of Automation and Instrumentation, Petroleum University of Technology, Ahvaz, Iran
Karim Salahshoor - Department of Automation and Instrumentation, Petroleum University of Technology, Ahvaz, Iran

Gas pipelines are used to transport the natural gas from the producer sources to the consumers. The extension of the pipelines reduces gas pressure. Compression stations are considered to compensate for the pressure drop. At these stations, several compressor units usually work in parallel to share gas inlet flow. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the load distribution method between parallel compressors in an optimal manner according to capacity of each compressor. In this paper, a load sharing algorithm is proposed by model-based predictive controller (MPC) to achieve a stable and efficient operation. Approximated efficiency curve is used to find optimal operating points of station. Applying these optimum points to the MPC controller will result in the optimal operation of each compressor unit and thus storing and saving the fuel. The results of implementation show that this method has a much better performance than the old methods.

Compressor, Optimization, Load sharing, MPC controller