Embedded Model Predictive Control for an Electric Submersible Pump on a Programmable Logic Controller

Electric Submersible Pumps (ESPs) can be installed in oil wells to create artificial lift, in order to increase recovery from the reservoir, and boost the production rate. A Model Predictive Controller (MPC) for an ESP, based on linearized models, is developed and designed using SEPTIC (Statoil´s in-house software tool for MPC), and implemented on a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC). Automatic code generators have been utilized to generate an application-specific MPC controller in ANSI C code. Hardware-in-the-loop simulation results show that the control performance of the PLC implementation is comparable to the original SEPTIC controller.