Sucker Rod Pump Research Articles

Modernized MESSDOSE intelligent force sensor

This article describes the development of an Intelligent Force Sensor (IFS) that can be easily installed between the crossheads of a sucker rod pumping unit. By placing the traditional MESSDOSE dynamograph and the microcontroller module based on modern microprocessor, communication and measurement devices in a single housing, a perfect measuring device, IFS, is created and the issue of its continuous feeding from an alternative energy source is considered.

Data Augmentation Method Based on Improved Generative Adversarial Network for the Sucker Rod Pump System

Data Augmentation Method Based on Improved Generative Adversarial Network for the Sucker Rod Pump System

Implementation of automated selection of downhole pumping equipment in the ABAI information system

This article provides a description of the main approaches and principles for constructing individual algorithms used in the "Selection of downhole pumping equipment" module of the ABAI information system. The calculations were based on generally recognized methods for constructing an inflow curve, strength calculation of the rod string of a sucker rod pumping unit, etc.
 The main goals of creating a module for the selection of downhole pumping equipment, in particular, the subsystem "Selection of a sucker rod pump" are to increase the efficiency of the mechanized well stock, reduce premature failures of downhole pumping equipment due to the correct calculation of the rod string, pumping equipment mode, automation of the selection of downhole pumping equipment due to the mass use of the program by process engineers when working with a mining mechanized fund.
 The calculation algorithm, concise functionality, friendly interface in the module are built taking into account the work of field process engineers and shop foremen, in the conditions of making operational decisions on the selection of downhole pumping equipment in case of current failures.
 The authors compared the selection results in the process of implementing the module with generally recognized foreign software systems.

Application of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) in Crude Oil Production Optimization Using Pump Efficiency Control

The collapse of oil prices in mid-2014 and early 2016 was the biggest in modern history that witnessed more than a 70% drop in the price to around $40 barrel. It prompted companies to think seriously to maintain profitability. Most companies were able to survive partly by simplifying their operations. Price recovery in 2021 is only 70% of its peak value. Companies are focusing on reducing the cost of operations, increasing production simultaneously, and finding new and different strategies to survive. The current scenario is witnessing strong research focusing on the development of process control for oil and gas upstream and downstream to improve the control and preventive maintenance to reduce operating costs and increase production. This paper presents the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) practical solution that improves the oil production rate from the well and increases the average pump efficiency (fillage) to 90%. This paper proposes a mechanism for collecting, storing, and analyzing all required parameters to build valuable charts. These charts’ data help optimize the values and parameters for controller setpoints to prevent pump gas lock problems. An artificial lift is required to lift the oil from the well. In this paper, the sucker rod pump is driven by a gas engine fed by the well’s gas. At the same time, SCADAPack 535E remote terminal unit collects all pump and well parameters such as hydraulic pressure, casing pressure, tubing pressure, and pump speed in stroke per minute (SPM). The remote terminal unit sends the data through a wireless network using a 5 GHz antenna to the main control room. The IIoT platform is designed using a visual basic programming language. Microsoft DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) and Kepware OPC server were used to work on the received data to monitor, generate charts, and apply the controllers.

INVESTIGATION OF THE INFLUENCE OF THE LOWERING DEPTH OF DOWNHOLE SUCKER-ROD PUMPS ON THE DELIVERY FACTOR

It is well known that, at present, late stage fields are operated mainly by sucker-rod pumps. The pumps are usually operated in rather complicated technological and hydrodynamic conditions, strongly influencing its efficiency. In the article the possible influence of downhole sucker-rod pump (DSRP) depth on delivery factor that is one of the indicators of operating efficiency of the entire sucker-rod pumping unit is investigated on the basis of actual field information. The values of oil and water delivery coefficients were calculated and functional dependence on the depth of sucker-rod pump immersion was built. The results showed an increase in the oil supply coefficient and a decrease in its water supply coefficient in the considered ranges of values. Mathematical models of the dependencies were also obtained. As a result of the conducted research, the expediency of the controlled increase of the depth of suspension of pumps in the conditions of operation of the considered field is confirmed. Keywords: down-hole sucker-rod pump, delivery ratio, well operation, pump parameters, depth of pump suspension

Triboelectric effect ocurred in sucker-rod pumping unit on the pump productivity

It is known that the seperation of gas as a result of free gas entry into the pump or the pressure decrease within the cylinder contributes to the reduction of pump efficiency, and this, in its turn, leads to the decrease of pump productivity as well. The paper authors suppose that one of the aspects affecting the pump efficiency is the triboelectric effect occuring in the valves. The paper analyzes the results of theoretic and experimental studies of this effect. Based on the experiment, a mathematic-statistic analysis is carried out and it is revealed that with the elimination of the triboelectric effect, the increase of pump efficiency for 2-3 % is possible.

Effect of fluid properties and boundary conditions on rod pump efficiency – Novel modeling

Among artificial lift systems, the most widely used method is sucker rod pumping. Since its inception in the oil industry, inefficiency in sucker rod pumping system due to gas interference is one of major concerns. The need for better understanding of gas interference during sucker rod pumping process is significantly required. Although, many models and techniques are available but there are many parameters, which need to be well studied and adequately addressed. This delineates the need to research all empirical parameters that could affect efficiency of conventional rod pump. The pump performance appears to be low in presence of gas which in extreme situation locks the pump and make the pump paralyzed completely. The models available in literature neglect mass transfer during suction process, which brings unreliable calculation of gas phase in pump. Models in literature on efficiency of pump and gas lock are studied to analyze the vital parameters and reasons for the inefficiency. The expedient analytical models to predict gas lock criteria and efficiency of conventional pump, based on liberation of gas during pumping, are established in this work. The models emphasize the importance of the fluids properties to be handled by pump, which affect the production rate while pumping with a gaseous phase. This new model considers free gas phase presence and mass transfer during working of pump. Sensitivity and comparative analysis of numerous parameters contributing to pump efficiency is established in this work. The study results provide some theoretical and analytical references for further advancements in system efficiency of conventional rod pump system and to improve economic benefits.

Comparison of a novel finite element method for sucker rod pump downhole dynamometer card determination based on real world dynamometer cards

• Evaluation of the downhole dynamometer card based on the finite elements method. • The novel advanced finite element method overcomes limitation of existing models and is based on physical parameters. • An excellent match with measured downhole dynamometer cards was reached. • The simulation results allow a the evaluation of the performance parameters of the sucker rod pumping system. An advanced dynamic finite element model is presented that diagnoses the downhole pump performance of sucker rod pumping systems, applicable for any pumping conditions and equipment used. The results are compared to downhole measurements and other state of the art evaluation techniques. Existing diagnostic tools exhibit specific limitations that reduce their applicability and output quality. This paper introduces a diagnostic tool, which can predict the rod string's stress field and its movement not only at the pump plunger but all along the rod string. Moreover, this tool can account for the interaction between rod guides and tubing as well as rod string and tubing. To this end, innovative tube-to-tube contact modeling is applied. The high precision results are accomplished by running a dynamic finite element simulation. The basic principle is to evaluate the plunger load incrementally by consecutively applying restarts of each time step, fully automated and computation time optimized. This publication shows that both the plunger load and the rod string's dynamic behavior can be determined for any given wellbore as long as the borehole trajectory and surface dynamometer measurements are known. The dynamic finite element model is evaluated for a deviated system and a vertical system equipped with two different downhole pump types. Comparing the simulation results with the available downhole measurements shows an excellent match. The the proposed solution provides a considerable amount of details about the overall system's behavior. The evaluation has shown that the performance of standard and novel downhole pump types can be successfully diagnosed in detail, which is just possible under limitations with commercial software solutions.. The novelty of the shown technique is the consideration of the full 3D trajectory, the implementation of only physical properties of the equipment used, and a realistic setup. The validation of the model output with measured downhole data indicates an excellent accuracy of the shown model.

Spectral analysis of mechanical and chemical defects by the parameters of the wattmetrogram of drawer drive pumping unit in the process of operation

TARGET. The purpose of this work is to develop a method for diagnosing the equipment of sucker-rod pumping units (SRPU) during operation by spectral analysis of the wattmetergram array signal. A wattmetering module is used as a measuring element, the developed software in the MatLab software package serves as a signal processing tool. The amplitude spectra of the object under study, constructed from an array of wattmetrograms by fast Fourier transform, in the MatLab software environment, are used to analyze the technical condition of the SRPU.METHODS. The method of wattmetering and spectral analysis of the signal of wattmetergram arrays makes it possible to control the SRPU during its operation under voltage. This control method is characterized by high accuracy, sensitivity to damage formation and allows the use of computer technologies for signal processing and analysis in order to diagnose devices. RESULTS. The method of spectral analysis is fully disclosed. The concept of spectrum and its construction is considered. The method of wattmetry is disclosed, as well as the principle of operation and the main characteristics of the wattmetry sensor. The removal and evaluation of experimental data from the operating SRPU during its operation was carried out. A wattmetrogram is constructed and a spectrum is constructed from the signal data array. The wattmetrogram of the SRPU with complicated working conditions, in which foaming was observed, showed a jump in the electrical load at the upper point of the balancer position. Spectral analysis showed an increase in amplitudes at certain frequencies, which may indicate the presence of oil foaming in the pump cylinder.CONCLUSION. This method of spectral analysis of the wattmetrogram signal with the help of the MatLab program makes it possible to identify mechanical and chemical defects of the SRPU according to the amplitude-frequency characteristics of the wattmetrogram parameters.

A novel method for trajectory recognition and working condition diagnosis of sucker rod pumping systems based on high-resolution representation learning

The pumping unit is the most important lifting equipment in the rod pumping system, which transmits ground power to the downhole pump through its sucker rod. Trajectory identification of the rod pumping system can be used to study the motion law of the pumping unit, and it is the basis for the design of the pumping parameters and the analysis of the working conditions. Most of the studies on the dynamics of the pumping unit are to discuss the simple harmonic motion of the suspension point or the motion of the crank-slider in the ideal state, which is quite different from the actual situation. In this paper, a key point detection method for oil pumping units based on high-resolution representation learning is proposed. The model adopts a multi-resolution parallel network, which connects multiple network branches with different resolutions in parallel. Then it performs multi-stage processing on the input pumping unit images and outputs the predicted Gaussian heatmaps of key points to realize the trajectory recognition of the pumping unit. Different from the traditional series convolutional network structure, which needs to recover high resolution from low resolution, the parallel structure of this model is able to maintain the high resolution of the backbone network and thus the learned representations are more accurate in spatial location. This method is also experimentally verified and compared with the latest convolutional network structure. The results show that the model accuracy of the high-resolution representation learning method is more than 6% higher than that of the comparison methods. In addition, the results of this model can be used to judge the balance of the pumping unit, automatically calculate the maximum stroke and polished rod stroke, and have guiding significance for the working condition diagnosis of the rod pumping system.

A Novel Hybrid Method for Indirect Measurement Dynamometer Card Using Measured Motor Power in Sucker Rod Pumping System

The dynamometer card (DC) is crucial for the remote monitoring of the sucker rod pumping system (SRPS). However, the DC sensors have poor real-time performance and high maintenance costs leading to difficulties in obtaining datasets of the downhole working states from different oil wells. Moreover, the motor power curve is easy to obtain in real-time and can reflect the changes in pumping unit load. Thus, this paper proposed a novel hybrid model for indirect measurement DC based on measured motor power. Firstly, based on the mechanical model analysis of SRPS, the dataset is constructed by transforming the motor power and geometric parameters of the SRPS into the polished rod torque, the first-derivative of polished rod torque, the second-derivative polished rod torque, and the torque factor. These four parameters are merged as the inputs of the data-driven model. Subsequently, a data-driven model implements the particle swarm (PSO) algorithm to optimize the weights and thresholds of the Back Propagation (BP) neural network model, which was trained to predict DCs of three common working states. Finally, the proposed method is verified experimentally through the measured DC and motor power data. Both experimental and prediction results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for generating DC. The mean DC area relative error of the hybrid method proposed in this paper is 2.52%.

Mathematical modeling of the deformation of a cylindrical ring under the influence of an external load distributed along the generatrix

The article is devoted to the mathematical modeling of the deformation of a cylindrical ring under the influence of an external load applied to it by pressing parallel plates. It is shown that at the last stage of oil field operation, the main method of artificial lift is the use of sucker rod pumping units (SRPU), on whose failure-free operation the profitability of oil production largely depends. It is also shown that the technical condition of the SRPU is controlled by the dynamometry method, which is the dependence of the rod string force on the suspension on the stroke of the polished rod. In this case, the main source of information is the force transducer. In the article, we propose using a hollow thick-walled cylinder, which is compressed between traverses consisting of parallel flat plates, as the primary sensitive element of the force transducer. The question of refinement and determination of the non-Hertzian contact deformation during compression of a thick-walled hollow cylinder by two parallel flat plates within the elasticity range is considered. It is shown that the well-known formula for the convergence of the axes of the cylinders being compressed according to the Hertzian method does not take into account the real deformation and convergence of the points of the cylinder due to compression and contact deformation between the generatrices of the cylinders. By solving the differential equation, formulas are derived to determine the value of the elastic deformation of a cylinder depending on its geometric dimensions under the influence of an external load applied to it by pressing plates. An example of calculating elastic deformation for different values of cylinder thicknesses depending on the load is given and its graph is plotted.

RESEARCH ON THE RESERVES FOR REDUCING THE METAL INTENSITY OF COMMERCIALLY AVAILABLE DOWNHOLE SUCKER-ROD PUMPING UNITS

A modern well pumping unit (WPU) consists of downhole equipment, including a downhole sucker-rod pump (BHP), tubing string and pump rods, and surface equipment, including the drive of the downhole sucker-rod pump and wellhead equipment. Each of these elements is serially produced by oil industry in accordance with state standards. In the given article with the purpose of finding out the possibility to decrease metal consumption of serial rocking units the possibility of transition to one-beam welded design of the rocking unit balancer is investigated. Keywords: rocking-type machine, rocker, single-beam design, metal-intensity,

Express-diagnostics of rods’ parting-twist off at wells equipped with sucker rod pump

The development of fields that are at a late or final stage of operation is carried out mainly with the use of downhole sucker rod pumps. The most characteristic failures for these installations are rods parting-twist off and malfunctions of pump valves. The methods of eliminating these accidents vary significantly the parting or twist off of the rods involves lifting of the downhole equipment, and the "sticking" of the shut-off valve assembly of the pump is eliminated by "resuscitation" of the downhole equipment (flushing with water, hot oil or solvent). An error in fault identification leads to incorrect planning of work to restore the operability of the downhole equipment and, as a result, to economic losses.
 The cause of malfunctions of the downhole equipment of downhole rod pumping units, as a rule, is determined by analyzing dynamograms. However, in many cases dynamograms do not allow to distinguish the lower twist off of the rods from the malfunction of the valves of the rod pump. In the presented work, a method for the operational determination of the parting or twist off of rods in the well is considered, which consists in creating an electrical circuit "rod string tubing string" and monitoring its integrity. To determine the type of malfunction, the synchronization unit measures the resistance of the system on the dielectric insert via the electromagnetic channel. In case of parting or twist off of the rods, the electrical resistance of the "tubing-pump-rod string" circuit will be much higher (more than 2 ohms) than in the absence of this failure (0...2 ohms).

Multi-Weighted Partial Domain Adaptation for Sucker Rod Pump Fault Diagnosis Using Motor Power Data

Motor power curves (MPCs) have received great attention for use in diagnosing the working conditions of sucker rod pumping systems (SRPSs) because of their advantages in accessibility and real-time performance. However, existing MPC-based approaches mostly need a rigorous assumption that the MPC instances of different working conditions are sufficient, which does not hold in industrial scenarios. To this end, this paper proposes an unsupervised fault diagnosis methodology to leverage readily available dynamometer cards (DCs) to diagnose collected unlabeled MPCs. Firstly, a mathematical model of the SRPS is presented to convert actual DCs to MPCs. Secondly, a novel diagnostic methodology based on adversarial domain adaptation is proposed for the problem of data distribution discrepancy across the collected and converted MPCs. Specifically, the collected unlabeled MPCs may only cover a subset of the working conditions of the abundant DCs, which will easily cause negative transfer and lead to dramatic performance degradation. This proposed methodology employs class-level and distribution-level weighting strategies so as to guide the network to focus on the instances from shared categories and down-weight the outlier ones. Validation experiments are performed to evaluate the mathematical model and the diagnostic methodology with a set of actual MPCs collected by a self-developed device. The experimental result indicates that the accuracy of the proposed algorithm can reach 99.3% in diagnosing actual MPCs when only labeled DCs and unlabeled actual MPCs are used.

Unsupervised Fault Diagnosis of Sucker Rod Pump Using Domain Adaptation with Generated Motor Power Curves

The poor real-time performance and high maintenance costs of the dynamometer card (DC) sensors have been significant obstacles to the timely fault diagnosis in the sucker rod pumping system (SRPS). In contrast to the DCs, the motor power curves (MPCs), which are accessible easily and highly associated with the entire system, have been attempted to predict the working conditions of the SRPS in recent years. However, the lack of labeled MPCs limits the successful applications in the industrial scenario. Thereby, this paper presents an unsupervised fault diagnosis methodology to leverage the generated MPCs of different working conditions to diagnose the actual unlabeled MPCs. Firstly, the MPCs of six working conditions are generated with an integrated dynamics mathematical model. Secondly, a framework named mechanism-assisted domain adaptation network (MADAN) is proposed to minimize the distribution discrepancy between the generated and actual MPCs. Specifically, benefiting from introducing the mechanism analysis to label the collected MPCs preliminarily, a conditional distribution discrepancy metric is defined to guarantee a more accurate distribution matching with respect to different working conditions. Eventually, validation experiments are performed to evaluate the mathematical model and the diagnosis method with a set of actual MPCs collected by a self-developed device. The experimental result demonstrates that the proposed method offers a promising approach for the unsupervised diagnosis of the SRPS.

Adaptive fault diagnosis of sucker rod pump systems based on optimal perceptron and simulation data

A highly precise and timely diagnosis technology can help effectively monitor and adjust the sucker rod production system (SRPS) used in oil wells to ensure a safe and efficient production. The current diagnosis method is pattern recognition of a dynamometer card (DC) based on feature extraction and perceptron. The premise of this method is that the training and target data have the same distribution. However, the training data are collected from a field SRPS with different system parameters designed to adapt to production conditions, which may significantly affect the diagnostic accuracy. To address this issue, in this study, an improved model of the sucker rod string (SRS) is derived by adding fault-parameter dimensions, with which DCs under 16 working conditions could be generated. Subsequently an adaptive diagnosis method is proposed by taking simulated DCs generated near the working point of the target SRPS as training data. Meanwhile, to further improve the accuracy of the proposed method, the DC features are improved by relative normalization and using additional features of the DC position to increase the distance between different types of samples. The parameters of the perceptron are optimized to promote its discriminability. Finally, the accuracy and real-time performance of the proposed adaptive diagnosis method are validated using field data.

AUTOMATION OF CONTROL OF ROOM DEEP OIL PUMP USINGTRACE MODE SCADA SYSTEMS

The issues of automation of technological processes are relevant for all industries. The article discusses the issues of automating the control of the operation of oil pumping units widely used in oil production using the TRACE MODE SCADA system from AdAstrA Research Group.
 
 To control the operation of a sucker rod pump of an oil pumping unit, the use of dynamometers is widespread in world practice. Technically, it is easier to carry out a more generalized control of the operation of an oil pumping unit using a wattmetergram, which displays the dependence of the active power consumed by the drive on time or the position of the polished rod. The results of power measurements are transmitted via communication channels to the computer of the SCADA system. Further, preliminary processing of the results of the control of the wattmeter diagram and the calculation of parameters characterizing the operation of the oil pumping unit are performed.
 
 At the stage of data preprocessing, noise filtering is performed using TRACE MODE tools that provide data exchange with MS Excel, MS Access, MS Visual Basic packages. The use of moving average, median filtering, and B-splines methods for this is considered. It is shown that cubic B-splines are an effective method of analytical description and graphical representation of experimental data, reducing the total mean square of the error. The use of splines in comparison with the polynomial approximation gives a slightly better approximation. The results of filtering and calculations by means of the SCADA system are displayed on the dispatcher’s monitor, archived, documented, etc. Thus, the related software products SCADA TRACE MODE and MS allow you to effectively implement complex data processing algorithms.

Multi-Scale Normalization Method Combined With a Deep CNN Diagnosis Model of Dynamometer Card in SRP Well

There are more than 20 types of dynamometer card measured of sucker rod pumping (SRP) wells in oil fields, and some working conditions are very complicated. The common diagnosis model of SRP well based on dynamometer card recognition has low accuracy and recall rate of complicated working conditions. In order to improve the accuracy and recall rate of multi-condition diagnosis of SRP well and solve the problem of inseparable data attributes caused by traditional dynamometer card normalization methods, a new dynamometer card preprocessing method is proposed, which uses a clustering analysis algorithm to obtain multiple normalized dynamometer cards of the original dynamometer card and at the same time, adds a set of time-series dynamometer cards to enhance the separability of data. The dynamometer card preprocessing method combined with four deep convolutional neural networks are used to build a diagnosis model. Experiments are conducted under 24 different working conditions, the accuracy of our method is up to 95.8%, and the average recall rate of complicated working conditions is up to 93.1%, which is 13.6 and 35.3% higher than that of the model (AlexNet) built by the traditional preprocessing method. In addition, the preprocessing method of dynamometer card proposed is applicable to all deep learning models and machine learning models. Field applications show that our method is very effective for recalling abnormal working conditions, which is of great significance to the real demand for intelligent diagnosis of SRP well.

Determination of lower break-out of the boom on wells equipped plunger pump

Development of fields at a late or final stage of exploitation of the Ural-Volga region is carried out mainly with the use of downhole sucker rod pumping units. The most typical failures for these installations are rods breaks and breaks and pump valve malfunctions. Methods for eliminating these accidents vary significantly: a break or a breakaway of the rods involves lifting the downhole equipment, and the "sticking" of the shut-off element of the pump valve assembly is eliminated by the "resuscitation" of the downhole equipment (flushing with water, hot oil or solvent). An error in recognizing a malfunction leads to incorrect planning of work to restore the operability of downhole equipment, and, as a result, to economic losses.The cause of the downhole equipment malfunctions of the sucker rod pumping units is usually determined by analyzing the dynamogram. However, in many cases dynamometer charts don't distinguish between the bottom flap of the rods and the failure of the sucker rod pump valves. In the article, a method of prompt determination of rod breakage and breakaway in a well is considered, which consists in creating an electrical circuit "rod string - tubing string" and monitoring its integrity. To determine the type of malfunction, the synchronization unit via the electromagnetic channel measures the resistance of the system on the dielectric insert. In case of break-off of rods, the electrical resistance of the "tubing-pump-rod string" circuit will be much higher (more than 2 ohms) than in the absence of this failure (0...2 ohms).