Metrics for the Rapid Assessment of Transient Severity in Pipelines

Concepts relating to energy transformations within built and natural systems have been some of the most fruitful in the history of science and engineering. The property of energy summarizes essential changes both in a system’s state and key interactions with its environment. Traditional unsteady flow analyses, based on momentum and continuity relations, have been dominated by considerations of wave mechanics, such as unsteady fluid friction which is typically accommodated via adjustments to the momentum equation. The current paper demonstrates how conventional analyses can be supplemented with metrics that can provide a complementary understanding of transient flows. Specifically, this study considers the classical Joukowsky equation, mass oscillations, and the role of energy in analyzing the performance of transient protection devices. The goal is to gain insight by considering energy transformations and interactions.