Adoptive Control of Well Drilling Systems

Control of well drilling operations poses a challenging issue to be tackled. The loss of well controlcould lead to the occurrence of blowout as a severe threat, involving the risk of human lives andenvironmental and economic consequences. Conventional proportional-integral (PI) controller is acommon practice in the well control operation. The small existing margin between pore pressure andfracture gradients jeopardizes the efficiency of this conventional method to exercise an accurate andprecise pressure control. There is a significant incentive to develop more efficient controlmethodologies to precisely control the annular pressure profile throughout the well bore to ascertainthe down-hole pressure environment limits. Adaptive control presents an attractive candidateapproach to achieving these demanding goals through adjusting itself to the changes during welldrilling operations. The current paper presents a set of adaptive control paradigms in the form of selftuningcontrol (STC). The developed STC’s are comparatively evaluated on a simulated well drillingbenchmark case study for both regulatory and servo-tracking control objectives. The different sets oftest scenarios are conducted to represent the superior performance of the developed STC methodscompared to the conventional PI control approach.

کلیدواژه ها:

Adaptive Control ، Self-tuning Control ، Well Drilling System