Model-Based Monitoring and Leak Detection in Oil and Gas Pipelines

Abstract

Summary An adaptive Luenberger-type estimator for the purpose of monitoring flow conditions and locating and quantifying leakages in petroleum pipelines is presented. The estimator only needs measurements of velocity, pressure, and temperature at the inlet and velocity and pressure at the outlet to function. The measurements are used to form a special set of boundary conditions for the estimator that ensures fast convergence of the estimation error. Depending only on measurements from inlet and outlet makes it possible to use OLGA, which is a state-of-the-art computational fluid dynamics simulator, to govern the one-phase fluid flow of the estimator. The estimator is tested with both a straight, horizontal pipeline and an actual, long pipeline with inclinations, and both simulations with oil and gas are carried out. In order to cope with modeling errors and biased measurements, estimation of roughness in the monitored pipeline is introduced.