Severe slugging flow identification from topological indicators

Abstract

In this work, topological data analysis is used to identify the onset of severe slug flow in offshore petroleum production systems. Severe slugging is a multiphase flow regime known to be very inefficient and potentially harmful to process equipment and it is characterized by large oscillations in the production fluid pressure. Time series from pressure sensors in subsea oil wells are processed by means of Takens embedding to produce point clouds of data. Embedded sensor data is then analyzed using persistent homology to obtain topological indicators capable of revealing the occurrence of severe slugging in a condition-based monitoring approach. A large dataset of well events consisting of both real and simulated data is used to demonstrate the possibilty of authomatizing severe slugging detection from live data via topological data analysis. Methods based on persistence diagrams are shown to accurately identify severe slugging and to classify different flow regimes from pressure signals of producing wells with supervised machine learning.

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Abbreviations
TDA
Topological Data Analysis
BHP
Bottom Hole Pressure
WHP
Wellehead Pressure
FT
Fourier Transform
PCA
Principal Component Analysis

Description