A Reliable and Cost-Effective Sand Monitoring System on the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)

Abstract

Sand monitoring gives the benefits of avoiding equipment erosion and production failure in the oil industry. This paper presents the design and implementation of a reliable and cost-effective sand monitoring system for measuring sand production in gas and oil flows in real time. The designed monitoring system involves two acoustic emission (AE) sensors and one Doppler sensor for gauging the sand impaction and the velocity of sand particles in a nonintrusive manner, respectively. It is implemented on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) as a prototype for real-time data acquisition and processing, and evaluated using a testbed pump skid available in our laboratory. Relying on a low-cost FPGA board to integrate all acquisition and processing functionality, our monitoring system can measure the sand production amount on-the-fly reliably with high accuracy, according to our experimental evaluation. It is likely to achieve better accuracy than one without the Doppler sensor. The proposed monitoring system is affordable for wide deployment, given its high accuracy, good resilience to surrounding noise, and low cost (when compared with commercially available systems whose price tags can be some tenfold higher).Index Terms-Acoustic and Doppler measurement, field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), finite impulse response (FIR) filters, non-intrusive monitoring, prediction models, prototyped systems, real-time data acquisition and processing, regression analyses.

Improving sand flow rate measurement of commercial ASDs and comparison with ultrasonic spectral analysis and filtering

“…The velocity of the sand particles increases as a result of any increase in fluid velocity, and so fluid velocity affects the reading from the ASD [11 ]. This reading is also affected by the surrounding noise [12 ]. For instance, in subsea applications the ASD is typically installed along with a choke valve on a subsea wellhead, and the noise generated by the choke valve can affect the reading of the ASD [13, 14 ].…”