Unplanned rod lift system outages often lead to long and costly repairs in addition to direct production loss. Leveraging design knowledge of the rod lift system combined with real-time condition monitoring represents a promising avenue to mitigate this problem. This study will demonstrate an application of advanced monitoring and diagnostic analytics on data from vibration, strain, current and voltage sensors installed in critical locations of a beam pumping unit.
When pumping conditions deviate from the norm, the operators are alerted with regard to pending failures, and a supervisory control layer takes immediate action to adjust the operational pumping speed profile to maintain production at a safe operational level or shut down the equipment in the event of imminent catastrophic failure.
This paper will review the sensor installations and data acquisition approach. Experimental field test results will be presented and discussed.