Reproducing slugging oscillations of an oil well

Florent Di Meglio (1) , Nicolas Petit (1) , Glenn Ole Kaasa (2) , Vidar Alstad (2)

1 CAS - Centre Automatique et Systèmes
2 Research Center Porsgrunn

This paper addresses the problem of reproducing oscillations generated by the well-known slugging phenomenon in multiphase flow. Reported investigations show how to determine the parameters of a recently proposed ordinary dierential equations system, so that it captures the characteristics of actually observed slugging oscillations. A tuning procedure based on the mathematical properties of the model is presented. It is then applied to a test case consisting of a real oil well located in the North Sea. An observer using only topside measurements allows asymptotic reconstruction of critical variables such as the downhole pressure.

Mots clés: Process; Control; Parameter identification; Slugging; Multiphase; Flow; Observer design; Oil; Gas

Domaines: Analyse classique [math.CA]

Florent Di Meglio, Nicolas Petit, Glenn Ole Kaasa, Vidar Alstad. Reproducing slugging oscillations of an oil well. 2010. ⟨hal-00482700⟩