Control Oriented Modeling of a De-oiling Hydrocyclone

Deoiling hydrocyclones are an important part of the downstream water treatment in offshore oil gas production, they ensure a low discharge of oil and thus a higher yield of produced oil. This work investigates the possibility of developing a simple control oriented model of a de-oiling hydrocyclone based OIL experimental data that can support systematic analysis and control design of hydrocyclone systems. The most widely used control solution of a hydrocyclone is a Pressure Drop Ratio (PDR) control strategy, which is often empirically designed and experimentally tuned in a case-by-case manner. There is a lack of a systematic and deep-insight analysis of the capability, stability and limitations of these control solutions, as there are few control-oriented models available for de-oiling hydrocyclone systems. This paper proposes a method of retrieving a set of simple 1st-order transfer function models from a set of designed experiments based OIL a lab-scaled hydrocyclone System. Some preliminary results are also illustrated and discussed. The conclusion of this preliminary study is that the models obtained can emulate the dynamics of the system in a reasonable manner subject to the trade-off between simplicity and accuracy. In addition, higher order state space models are introduced and their relative advantage of depicting the complicated dynamics of the hydrocyclone's pressures is investigated. (C) 2015, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.