Reproducing slugging oscillations of a real oil well

Florent Di Meglio (1) , G.O. Kaasa (2) , Nicolas Petit (1) , 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 differential equations system, so that it captures the charac- teristics 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.

Domaines: Sciences de l'ingénieur [physics]; Automatique / Robotique

Florent Di Meglio, G.O. Kaasa, Nicolas Petit, Vidar Alstad. Reproducing slugging oscillations of a real oil well. 49th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Dec 2010, Atlanta, United States. pp.4473-4479, ⟨10.1109/CDC.2010.5717367⟩. ⟨hal-00554418⟩