Water Cut Measurement and Solvent Detection for Production Surveillance and Optimization using Microwave Sensors
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2023-11-22
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Monitoring of water-cut and solvent in multiphase flows is essential in petroleum production, processing, and transportation. Achieving precise online water cut measurements is highly desirable but challenging, especially when high accuracy is necessary. It holds great importance for maintaining production quality, assessing well conditions, reducing energy consumption, and automating oil production management. Solvent recovery in Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) methods such as Expanding Solvent-Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (ES-SAGD) is an important key metric for assessing the solvent return that meets economic threshold. Online water-cut meters typically rely on sensing the dielectric permittivity, density, infrared, or gamma-ray spectral absorption characteristics of the oil and water mixture. The currently available methods lack an inexpensive, non-contact, real-time water cut (WC) measurement that is high in demand and technology. Microwave technology can introduce a practical solution to address these problems. Over the past two decades, planar microwave resonator-based sensors have become increasingly popular. This heightened popularity is due to several factors, including their uncomplicated fabrication process, ease of integration with experimental setups, and adaptability in design. A noteworthy and intriguing aspect of microwave sensors is their ability to perform non-contact sensing and real-time monitoring. This unique capability arises from the interaction between the electromagnetic field produced by the sensor and the characteristics of the sensing material in its immediate surroundings. This research work investigated water-cut measurement and solvent detection through the integration of unique planar microwave sensor designs within highly sophisticated experimental setups at various conditions. The sensors are designed such that they do not require any special facilities or equipment for their integration in the pipelines to perform efficiently.
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Kamal, B. (2023). Water cut measurement and solvent detection for production surveillance and optimization using microwave sensors (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.