Adaptive Control design for a 3D reservoir model under water coning. (April 2019) - Safari, Mehdi
Abstract: Prevention of water production is a serious concern in the oil fields as it reduces the oil production rate and makes some troubles for surface facilities. Some researchers suggested boundary control approach to delay the water/gas cone break through. According to the physical nature of petroleum reservoirs, uncertainty is an undeniable fact. Therefore, the control law that has been developed by the researchers is not implementable for practical applications. To this end, the paper proposes to use the adaptive control approach for the reservoir which is described by a nonlinear parabolic PDE with uncertainty in permeability. For this reason, based on direct Lyapunov stability method and adaptive control theory, an adaptive control law is developed for the closed-loop system. Next, a mathematical proof is used to show that the law always guarantees the global stability of the reservoir. Also, simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and the performance quality of the presented approach in a general model. Using the proposed approach, production engineers are able to control an oil reservoir in order to prevent water coning without any knowledge about its real permeability.