Sand Rate Model and Data Processing Method for non-Instructive Ultrasonic Sand Monitoring in Flow Pipeline

  • Author(s) / Creator(s)
  • Sand production is a critical issue during oil and gas production from sandstone reservoirs.
    Uncontrolled sand production not only poses the risk of well failure, but also can cause extensive
    damage to surface and subsurface facilities such as tubing, pumps, valves and pipelines. In recent
    decades, research on sand production has been conducted in several fronts including sanding
    prediction, sand monitoring, sand control and wellbore integrity analysis to prevent or alleviate
    sand production and its consequences. This paper mainly focuses on acoustic sand monitoring
    which produces real-time information that can be used for maximizing the safe production of
    hydrocarbon.
    We developed a new methodology for processing the acoustic signals based on the kinetic
    energy of sand particles in the pipeline. Further, we developed a procedure for identifying and
    filtering acoustic noise from unrelated events. We validated the proposed methodology for signal
    processing against experimental data. The results indicated that the de-noising algorithm could filter
    out the noise from the acoustic data and the model was effective for assessing the sand rate.

  • Date created
    2015-01-01
  • Subjects / Keywords
  • Type of Item
    Article (Draft / Submitted)
  • DOI
    https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-grjf-n750
  • License
    Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International