Development of a simulation tool for pumping systems with separate simulators for piping and control subsystems

A simulation tool was developed to analyze transient behaviors for the design work of large scale pumping systems. The tool has two separate simulators, a piping subsystem simulator to simulate hydraulic phenomena and a controller simulator to simulate behavior of the control subsystem. Simulation results for the whole pumping system are obtained by a cooperative simulation that is realized by exchanging data between these two simulators and synchronizing their calculation progress. The tool employs a shared memory architecture that reduces the data exchange time to implement a cooperative simulation on a personal computer. The tool also has functions that adopt a graphical user interface for a usability to generate calculation models for the simulators and to evaluate simulation results. Comparison with the measured transient data from a working pumping system verified that the simulation results were accurate to within 10% which was appropriate for a transient analysis of design work. The ratio of processing time for the simulators switching to the total simulation processing time was less than 5% which is a sufficiently low rate for cooperative simulation on a personal computer.