Non-Intrusive Measurement of Sand Production in Boyhai Bay Using Vibration Sensor Method

Abstract

Sand production is an important issue that occurs in the petroleum industry during the process of crude oil production in offshore field. Many non-intrusive sensor measurement technologies have been applied in sand production monitor, most of them measuring ultrasonic signals of more than 100KHz generated by sand particles impacts on the pipe wall. This paper illustrates a alternative vibration signature analysis method to measure the sand production. A special broadband vibration sensor was installed at the outside of pipeline to receive sand signals. Meanwhile, vibration signals generated by sandy crude were analyzed by time-frequency method. A simple test was used to ensure the approximate scope of characteristic sand frequency band. By applying these characteristic sand frequency bands, there is a distinguish between sand production well and no sand production well below the 20KHz. After that, both of the characteristic frequency band filter method and a peak searching-denoising method were used to maximize extract the sand signals in strong crude oil background noise. By using these methods, the normalized power spectrum was selected to reveal the difference between sand production well and no sand production well, and sand production characteristic can be observed in real-time. The measurement results of two different sand production wells showed that there is a good correlation between the normalized vibration power spectrum amplitude and the sand content. This result is also consistent with the supplied results by field tests. Therefore, this vibration signature analysis was effectively used to detect the sand production phenomena, and it would be helpful to apply low-cost vibration sensor technology to monitor the sand production in offshore field exploitation.