Systems for Asset Managements of Production Platforms

Abstract

Asset management tools related with instruments, control loops, equipment and processes, are important to reduce production costs of offshore platforms. These technologies can help to identify potential problems in advance regarding equipment and process in order to intervene and correct them. These problems can be related with operating conditions or due to the wear and tear of the equipment itself. In these scenarios, solutions could be obtained either changing the way of operating this equipment or planning new maintenances. Therefore, asset management tools can contribute to increase the reliability of the platform. This paper will describe a set of tools for asset management and discuss the challenges of its use in offshore production platforms. On a first level, there are tools that help to evaluate the quality of information related with equipment's sensors. The instruments may fail or generate a drift in its measurement over time. This deviation may compromise the operation of the associated equipment and should be detected in order to plan maintenance. On a second level, there are tools to assess the performance of PID controllers. For instance, a bad PID tuning can increase the variability of the process, putting the equipment into regions of low efficiency, which will contribute to premature wear and failure thereof. On a third level, there are tools for monitoring equipment performance, such as pumps and compressors. At this level, we try to monitor both the vibrations and the equipment performance, in order to identify deviations from the desired or normal operation. These deviations will generate alerts to be checked by experts. And finally, there are tools for process monitoring, which through KPI (key performance indicators), are able to identify early deviations from the optimal operating regions. This paper will also present some results of the application of these asset management tools. Introduction Asset management is an important activity to ensure reliability and optimize operating cost of offshore platforms. Through constantly monitoring operational variables and their alarms it is possible to identify problems and abnormal situations before they evolve to more serious faults (Venkatasubramanian et al., 2003). These problems or faults can be related with operating conditions or due to the wear of the equipment itself. In these scenarios, solutions could be obtained either changing the way of operating this equipment or planning a new maintenance intervention. Therefore, asset management comprises activities related with condition monitoring as well as supervision of the way equipment and processes are operated, helping to increase the overall availability and safety of the platform.