A Reliable and Cost-Effective Sand Monitoring System on the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)

Sand monitoring gives the benefits of avoiding equipment erosion and production failure in the oil industry. This paper presents the design and implementation of a reliable and cost-effective sand monitoring system for measuring sand production in gas and oil flows in real time. The designed monitoring system involves two acoustic emission (AE) sensors and one Doppler sensor for gauging the sand impaction and the velocity of sand particles in a nonintrusive manner, respectively. It is implemented on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) as a prototype for real-time data acquisition and processing, and evaluated using a testbed pump skid available in our laboratory. Relying on a low-cost FPGA board to integrate all acquisition and processing functionality, our monitoring system can measure the sand production amount on-the-fly reliably with high accuracy, according to our experimental evaluation. It is likely to achieve better accuracy than one without the Doppler sensor. The proposed monitoring system is affordable for wide deployment, given its high accuracy, good resilience to surrounding noise, and low cost (when compared with commercially available systems whose price tags can be some tenfold higher).

I. Introduction

Sand Production plays an essential role in the oil and gas industry, not only because equipment can get damaged by sand erosion and bring about a tremendous loss to oil companies, if left unchecked, but also because unpredictable failures may lead to a consequent safety risk to the people on-site, and eventually to unstoppable ecological catastrophes.