Control-Oriented Modeling and Experimental Validation of a Deoiling Hydrocyclone System

Performance Comparison of Control Strategies for Plant-Wide Produced Water Treatment

Offshore produced water treatment (PWT) accounts for cleaning the largest waste stream in the offshore oil and gas industry. If this separation process is not properly executed, large amounts of oil are often directly discharged into the ocean. This work extends two grey-box models of a three-phase gravity separator and a deoiling hydrocyclone, and combines them into a single plant-wide model for testing PWT control solutions in a typical process configuration. In simulations, three known control solutions—proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control, H∞ control, and model predictive control (MPC)—are compared on the combined model to evaluate the separation performance. The results of the simulations clearly show what performance metrics each controller excels at, such as valve wear, oil discharge, oil-in-water (OiW) concentration variance, and constraint violations. The work incentivizes future control to be based on operational policy, such as defining boundary constraints and weights on oil discharge, rather than maintaining conventional intermediate performance metrics, such as water level in the separation and pressure drop ratio (PDR) over the hydrocyclone.

The Impact of Riser-Induced Slugs on the Downstream Deoiling Efficiency

In Oil and gas productions, the severe slug is an undesired flow regime due to the negative impact on the production rate and facility safety. This study examines the severe riser-induced slugs’ influence on a typical separation process, consisting of a 3-phase gravity separator physically linked to a deoiling hydrocyclone. Four inflow scenarios are compared: Uncontrolled, open-loop, feasible, and infeasible closed-loop anti-slug control, respectively. Three PID controllers’ coefficients are kept constant for all the tests: The separator pressure, water level, and hydrocyclone pressure-drop-ratio (PDR) controllers. The simulation results show that the separation efficiency is significantly larger in the closed-loop configuration, probably due to the larger production rates which provide a preferable operation condition for the hydrocyclone. It is concluded that both slug elimination approaches improve the separation efficiency consistency, but that the closed-loop control provides the best overall separation performance.