2019 Sucker Rod Pumping
Workshop
Cox Convention Center, Oklahoma City, OK
September 9 - 12, 2019
Dynamic Load Cell Calibration
– or –
The identification of potentially
miscalibrated load cell offset
Walter Phillips
Key Point
Here’s the whole presentation in one slide…
You should allow the
calculated pump cards
to float left/right
Gibbs, 1963
Predicting the Behavior of
Sucker-Rod Pumping Systems
~1973 we started aligning the
surface & pump cards
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Oklahoma City, OK
Benefits of dynamic position
Understand pump spacing
See 2016 presentation
Dynamic Relative
Rod Stretch
Position and load are forever intertwined
If the load is off, that tweaks calculated position
This is important!
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How to calculate a pump card
Finite difference method – See SPE #18189
Remove static loads (Rwf)
First row is measured position
Hooke’s Law to get 2nd row
Taylor Series to get next rows
At the bottom, get load from
calculated displacement
This is the These are all
secret sauce relative positions
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Load Affects Position
Each calculated down-hole point depends
on the previously calculated points
If we kick off the algorithm with shifted loads,
the calculated positions will also be shifted
Then we calculate the down-hole loads
based on those shifted positions
Lots of fun math-y
hand waving
2019 Sucker Rod Pumping
Sept. 9 - 12, 2019 5
Workshop Oklahoma City, OK
Dynamic Load Cell Calibration
Patent pending, etc.
If the load input to the finite difference
method is incorrect, the pump card
will be shifted on the diagonal
Improperly calibrated load cells can be
identified from the erroneous data
Assumes we only care about the load cell offset
Load span is a different problem
But somewhat related since we are See animation
reading loads in the upper range in a few slides
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Visual Load Offset Example
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Another Load Offset Example
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What about the load span?
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Span from correct minimum…
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And Position? (Just for fun)
Positions obviously don’t get shifted quite like this in real life
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Static Snapshots
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Static Snapshots
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Static Snapshots
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Pitfalls
Load values can be off for different reasons
Incorrect rod specs
Generally identifiable through other means
Deviation / Friction / Side-loading
Manifests in different areas of the card
Incorrect load input is assumed to be constant
(unlike load effects from friction, which are dynamic)
Incorrect fluid gradient / buoyancy
Relatively easy to check / test
This method can help identify those wells
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Incorrect Load Cell Span
Yet another way the pump card can tilt
May be tubing anchor
May be pump slippage
May be incorrect position (etc.)
…Or it may be the load cell span tilting the card
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How do I know if the card is at zero?
Damping factors, friction, etc. distort the card
Dipping below zero doesn’t necessarily
mean the loadcell is mis-calibrated
Load and position of the
pump card gives a clue
Remember, incorrect surface load
moves the pump card on a diagonal
Other variables don’t move the plot
on a clean diagonal (mostly)
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Benefits
Load is a critical safety factor
Did you overload your gearbox because the load
cell was reading lower than actual loads?
How would you even know?
Since this method operates on existing data,
it can be easily deployed at the SCADA level
Alerts on wells that “may” be out of spec
Maybe do some forensic analysis on failures?
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Additional Benefit
This method can identify the magnitude
of offset miscalibration
Integrate this offset value back to the POC
Obviously requires POC implementation
Sam controllers have this setting, but Patent
Pending
no way to determine the correct value
Consider a load cell that reads high
Set points may be configured accordingly high
What happens when the calibration is fixed?
Is the high2019load
Sucker
shutdown
Rod Pumping
setting
Workshop Oklahoma
reduced?
City, OK
Sept. 9 - 12, 2019 19
Conclusion
Free your pump cards’ position!
Your pump cards want to be free
Pump cards shifted on the diagonal
“may” indicate improper load readings
Easy way to identify/classify problematic wells
(load cell, fluid gradient, incorrect rod string, etc.)
Identifying faulty data from
faulty data is kind of cool
https://xkcd.com/552/
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Oklahoma City, OK
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Oklahoma City, OK