Design, development and control of a managed pressure drilling setup

Amin, Al (2017) Design, development and control of a managed pressure drilling setup. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

[English] PDF - Accepted Version Available under License - The author retains copyright ownership and moral rights in this thesis. Neither the thesis nor substantial extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author's permission. Download (8MB)

Abstract

Drilling in challenging conditions require precise control over hydrodynamic parameters for safer and efficient operation in oil and gas industries. Automated managed pressure drilling (MPD) is one of such drilling solution which helps to maintain operational parameters effectively over conventional drilling technique. The main goal is to maintain bottomhole pressure between reservoir formation pressure and fracture pressure with kick mitigation ability. Real life MPD system has to confront nonlinearity induced by drilling fluid rheology and flow parameters. To obtain a better understanding of this operation, a lab scale experimental setup has been developed. Reynolds number and pressure drop per unit length were considered to obtain hydrodynamic similarity. A vertical concentric pipe arrangement has been used to represent the drill string and annular casing region. A linearized gain switching proportional integral (PI) controller and a nonlinear model predictive controller (NMPC) have been developed to automate the control operation in the experimental setup. A linearizer has been designed to address the choke nonlinearity. Based on the flow and pressure criteria, a gain switching PI controller has been developed which is able to control pressure and flow conditions during pipe extension, pump failure and influx attenuation cases. On the other hand, a nonlinear Hammerstein-Weiner model has been developed which assists in bottomhole pressure estimation using pump flow rate and choke opening. The identified model has been integrated with a NMPC algorithm to achieve effective control within predefined pressure and flow constraints. Lastly, a performance comparison has been provided between the linearized gain switching PI controller and NMPC controller.

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