A High-Gain Observer for a Wet Gas Centrifugal Compressor

Abstract

Subsea wet gas compression is an enabling boosting technology for cost-efficient production of small and remote gas condensate fields. These wet gas compressors are capable of compressing gases containing up to 5% liquid, removing the need for pre-separation and thereby reducing the investment and maintenance costs. However, the presence of liquid in the gas significantly changes the compression performance from that of dry gas, resulting in a reduced process gain and an increased normal operating region for increasing liquid content. A novel backstepping process controller was previously proposed to track and stabilize a desired pressure reference inside the normal operating region, requiring feedback from several variables, including the mass flow. Mass flow is an inaccurate and expensive measurement. Therefore, a full-order high-gain observer is derived for the wet gas compression process with proven local exponential convergence. The performance of the derived observer is studied in simulations.