Design and comparison of adaptive estimators for Under-balanced Drilling

Real time knowledge of total mass of gas and liquid in the annulus and geological properties of the reservoir is very useful in many active controllers, fault detection systems and safety applications in the well during petroleum exploration and production drilling. Sensors and instrumentation can not measure the total mass of gas and liquid in the well directly and they are computed by solving a series of nonlinear algebraic equations with measuring the choke pressure and the bottom-hole pressure. This paper presents different estimator algorithms for estimation of the annular mass of gas and liquid, and production constants of gas and liquid from the reservoir into the well during Under Balanced Drilling. The results show that all estimators are capable of identifying the production constants of gas and liquid from the reservoir into the well, while the Lyapunov based adaptive observer gives the best performance comparing with other methods when there is a significant amount of noise.