OTC-26246-MS

Critical Equipment Monitoring in Production Platforms

M. M. Campos, R. Grizante, L. Junior, T. Rosa, B. Crippa, S. Santos, M. M. Machado, F. Ribeiro, C. Azevedo,
L. Cavadas, and S. Oliveira, Petrobras

Copyright 2015, Offshore Technology Conference

This paper was prepared for presentation at the Offshore Technology Conference Brasil held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 27–29 October 2015.

This paper was selected for presentation by an OTC program committee following review of information contained in an abstract submitted by the author(s). Contents
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Abstract
The offshore platforms, located at great distances from the coast, pose many challenges to maintain and
increase reliability of critical equipment, in order to decrease operational and maintenance costs. The
difference between planned and non-planned shutdowns can be roughly millions of dollars for one
platform. These facts justify the need for an enhanced monitoring system for critical equipment of
offshore platforms, contributing to reduce risks, loss of production, and to raise equipment availability.
One way to deal with this problem is to have remote monitoring centers which follow performance
indicators of the various critical platforms’ equipment (heat exchangers, pumps, compressors, etc.), with
the main goal of identifying deviations, before they evolve to more serious faults. This center should have
a well trained staff, good process to foster multidisciplinary collaboration with other specialized teams to
diagnose and define required actions, and, last but not least, good tools to monitor the process variables.
This paper will describe a set of tools for monitoring equipment performance, such as heat exchangers,
pumps, and compressors. These tools try to identify the quality of equipment’s sensors, to assess the
performance of PID controllers associated with this equipment, and many other performance indicators as,
for example, deviations from the optimal (high efficiency) operating regions. These tools are connected
with plant data information and acquire real time data (flowrates, pressures, and temperatures) from the
process streams, and can send them to rigorous process simulator in order to close mass and energy
balances. This strategy can reconcile data and infers missing operational information, like some key
performance indicators. These tools can also receive inspection data of equipment, obtained by mobile
systems, to be used to identify deviations from the desired operational region. Finally, this paper will also
present results and gains of the application of these tools, process, and equipment monitoring center for
offshore platforms. This paper will show the benefits to improve equipment reliability and safety, thus
reducing risks and losses due to possible equipment failure. It will also presents and discuss new tools and
process to monitor critical equipment.

Introduction
The process of monitoring critical equipment aims to increase safety, availability and operational
efficiency. In particular for platforms located far from the coast, these monitoring processes may help to
reduce the need for specialists on board to diagnose problems, can also help to do a better maintenance
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planning, to reduce unplanned shutdowns, contributing to reduce operational and maintenance costs. One
of the greatest advantages of implementing a monitoring process is to foster and improve interaction and
collaboration among disciplines, operation and maintenance. Figure 1 shows an overview of the moni-
toring process, which requires dedicated teams in onshore remote centers responsible to interact with
specialists on many disciplines, and also with the operation and maintenance. It is important to have a
management system to generate equipment health alerts and follow the actions, through daily meetings
(videoconferences) or other specific weekly meetings.

Figure 1—Process of monitoring critical equipment.

Figure 2 shows an example of an oil and gas production system composed of multiple platforms that
share a common gas pipeline. An effective oil and gas monitoring system must be composed of several
subsystems: one to supervise the gas pipeline, other to monitor oil production platforms, offloadings, other
to oversee critical equipment, etc. This paper will discuss all these monitoring systems, showing the tools
and some results.
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Figure 2—Oil and gas production system.

Monitoring gas pipeline network

The objective of this monitoring system is to ensure safe and reliable operation, respecting all the
constraints, for instance, the CO2 composition of the gas delivered to the onshore gas processing plant, the
maximum gas flow rate at each section of the pipeline, etc. Examples of the decisions taken by the
monitoring team are the definition of maximum or the desired gas flow rates exported for each platform
in order to ensure the gas composition in the pipeline output, or to avoid high pressure or flow in the
pipeline, etc. Examples of the tools used by the monitoring teams are: a real-time data collection system
(for instance PI system), specific spreadsheets, dynamic and static process simulators, laboratory data of
the gas composition at various parts of the pipeline, information of platforms operations, etc. The
simulators are used to close mass and energy balances and also to reconcile data and infer some missing
operational information, like pressures and composition along the gas pipeline.
An example of the work of this monitoring team of the gas pipelines in Petrobras is described here: one
day there was a problem in the fixed platform (see figure 2), which caused a shutdown of its subsea valve,
so the engineers used the dynamic simulators results (D’Andrea et al., 2015) to follow up pressures along
this gas system (see figure 3). The dynamics of this system is around 2 to 3 hours, and using the dynamic
simulator, engineers were able to evaluate pressures and compositions along this pipeline in order to
respect the constraints and demand some operational changes for the platforms.

Figure 3—Santos Operational Simulation System (D’Andrea et al., 2015).

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Another example of pipeline monitoring gains happened in other gas system, which is similar to that
shown in figure 2. In this case the problem was associated with the startup of one platform, after an
emergency shutdown of all wells. So, this platform had to import a lot of gas from the pipeline system,
but maintaining the gas pressure above certain value, in order to succeed to put into operation again its
wells, using gas lift. Therefore, the onshore monitoring team helped to define the right alignment and the
gas production of other platforms, in order to have a fast startup of the platform, minimizing production
losses.
PID control loops monitoring system
The aim of this monitoring system is to assess the performance of PID control loops as well as follow up
its degradation over time. This management system can suggest improvements in PID tuning, or inclusion
of measurement filters to reduce noise, or request maintenance in some control valves to reduce stiction
(static ⫹ friction), etc. Examples of the tools used by the monitoring teams are: a real-time data collection
system (for instance PI system), specific spreadsheets, BR-PerfX (Farenzena and Trierweiler, 2008) and
BR-Tuning (Acioli et al., 2009) (Campos et al., 2013). These tools (BR-PerfX and BR-Tuning) were
developed in a research and development project between Petrobras with Brazilian Universities (UFRGS
and UFCG) with the objective of implement a control loop management system. As an example of this
type of monitoring work, figure 3 shows BR-PerfX implemented for the TEG subsystem of a FPSO in
Santos Basin (see figure 4). It was identified that three (03) control loops had a bad PID tuning parameters.
After using BR-Tuning tool to obtain suitable PID parameters that minimizes interactions between the
loops, it was attained a better control performance for TEG system, as shown in figure 5. The huge
decrease in the variability of the TEG regeneration temperature, allows maintaining its values inside the
desirable region for regeneration, and ensures an increase in gas drying efficiency, so minimizing the risk
of hydrates formation.

Figure 4 —BR-PerfX control loop management system.

Figure 5—Better performance after PID tuning.

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Monitoring critical automation systems

The purpose of this system is to monitor safety system valves, measurements of the interlock system,
alarms of the control system, etc. Examples of the tools used by the monitoring teams are: a real-time data
collection system (for instance PI system), a web portal to monitor integrity of critical systems, specific
spreadsheets, BR-AlarmExpert (Leitão et al., 2008) (Araujo et al., 2009), mobile inspection systems
(Campos et al., 2013), information of platforms operations, etc. Petrobras has developed with Federal
University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN) a tool, called BR-AlarmExpert to assist the process of alarm
management. The main objective of this tool is to help to minimize the flood of alarms, which implies in
the discredit of alarms system, with consequences for operational safety, costs and leading sometimes to
loss of equipment and damage to the environment. Other examples of the decisions taken by this
monitoring team are the preparation of daily reports of the instruments of the safety system that are
inhibited to operate and the management of these alerts. They follow if bypassed instruments have the
required approvals, when they will attain the maximum bypassed time, etc. The main objective of this
monitoring system is to reduce operational risks.
Another example of the monitoring results is the spreadsheet shown in figure 6, whereby onshore
remote center’s team can follow for each platform the planning and the execution of critical instruments’
calibration. The main goal is to guarantee that the schedule agreed with regulatory agencies is been
followed.

Figure 6 —Spreadsheet with planning of critical instruments’ calibration.

Monitoring Process Systems

The goal is to monitor key processes and their critical equipment, in order to identify early deviations,
such as loss of heat exchangers efficiency, separators’ efficiency, etc. The tools used are: historical data
collection systems (PI system), surveillance web portals, specific spreadsheets, process simulators,
laboratory data system (water cut, oil in water, humidity, etc.), mobile data collection system (BR-
Mobile), heat exchangers monitoring system (Fouling) and production optimization systems (BR-SIOP),
among others.
The monitoring process consists of following critical variables, with daily meetings with many
specialists of different disciplines, to identify and define alerts that will be generated for the operation and
maintenance teams. Examples of actions that can be requested for operation are: definition of new flow
rates of chemicals products, new setpoints for some process controllers, new choke position of production
wells, etc. Examples of actions for the maintenance staff are: planning the cleaning of certain heat
exchangers, maintenance of some instruments, exchange of some filters, etc.
As an example of these monitoring process systems, we will discuss heat exchangers. The issue of
fouling in heat exchanger is a major concern, especially for offshore platforms, as the efficiency of
separators trains depends on crude’s temperature. So, heat exchanger performance must be tracked as
precisely as possible in order to identify operational problems and maximize the heat recovery from it.
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Petrobras has developed a tool, named FoulingTR (Liporace and Oliveira, 2007) (Campos et al., 2013),
which is an on-line heat exchanger performance system, based on rigorous simulation of the equipment
in order to predict both the operational and clean heat transfer coefficient. A real time comparison between
these two values indicates the thermal efficiency of the heat exchanger (measured by the fouling factor,
for instance). The benefit of this tool is to perform frequently these calculations and provide this
information to users through web interfaces (see figure 7).

Figure 7—Fouling system web portal and fouling’s trend for one heat exchanger.

Heat exchanger is also monitored through laboratory analysis of the amount of chlorine and iron
present in the refrigeration water. The objective is to minimize corrosion with the optimum definition of
the flow rate of chemical products (corrosion inhibitors). Fails in heat exchangers can generate huge
production losses.
Another example of the gains of monitoring critical equipment was the early identification of a
decrease of the gas lift flow rate for one production well. Specialists’ diagnosis was the beginning of
hydrate formation, which was solved with chemical product injection in this well, avoiding huge
production losses. The monitoring team also has model based production optimization tools, for instance,
BR-SIOP (Teixeira et al., 2013), which tries to maximize the production satisfying constraints imposed
by the reservoir, wells, pipelines and platform process plant.
Monitoring Turbomachinery
In oil and gas facilities, the pumping and compression systems require a high level of equipment
availability, and therefore faults that could result in the shutdown of the system should be minimized and
even eliminated (Carnero, 2002) (Campos et al., 2013). Faults in these critical systems can lead to
production losses as large as 20,000 bbl to certain production units. This fact justifies the need for an
enhanced monitoring system for compression and pumping systems of offshore platforms, contributing to
reduce risks, loss of production and to raise equipment availability.
In order to monitor critical equipment, Petrobras has implemented a real time monitoring center for
machines (turbocompressors and pumps), which uses some specialized tools, for instance, a real-time data
collection system (for instance PI system), a web portal to monitor turbomachinery (CIM-TBM), specific
spreadsheets, vibration monitoring system, mobile inspection systems and performance monitoring
system (BR-Compressor and BR-Pump).
The monitoring process involves a dedicated team for the surveillance of critical variables of the
machines, with regular meetings for discussions with experts from different disciplines about the problems
identified. They try to analyze many indicators associated with performance, production losses and
availability, and define some alerts and recommendations that will be sent to operation and maintenance
groups. Then they will monitor if the actions resulting from these alerts have already been implemented
by the operating or maintenance teams.
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Figure 8 —CIM-TBM center and web interface of the monitoring system.

As an example of the gains of this constant monitoring process of the critical compressor’s variables,
it could be mentioned a case where it was detected a fast increase in bearing temperature of one machine
(see Figure 9) of about 15 C during the last 10 days. If bearings’ temperature continued to increase at this
rate, this compressor would have stopped with an emergency shutdown in 9 days. However, the
surveillance team has generated an alert to the experts and demanded an analysis of this problem. Experts
of turbomachinery, process and automation, at their regular meetings, discussed this issue and prepared
a report (see Figure 10) suggesting some actions for the operation and maintenance groups, in order to
prevent further wear and tear of this critical equipment and to avoid a possible unplanned shutdown.

Figure 9 —CIM-TBM detected an increase in bearing temperature of one compressor.

Figure 10 —Report with problem description and recommendations for operation and maintenance.

In this case, the actions recommended by experts for operation and maintenance teams were:
1. Increase pressure setpoint of the bearing lubrication oil system to its maximum design limit, in
order to increase the oil flow rate, so helping to reduce the temperature;
2. Reduce the lubrication oil temperature for your minimum value, seeking to reduce the viscosity
and increase the thickness of bearing oil film.
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3. Decrease the discharge pressure of the machine to its minimum operational limit in order to reduce
the axial thrust, and consequently the bearing temperature.
4. Inspect the bearing oil system.
As a result of these actions, it was possible to stop this trend and avoid unplanned shutdown, but the
bearing temperature continued operating at high levels until the next overhaul.
For another machine, it was also identified a high bearing temperature at the turbo generator, during
the inspection, maintenance team has found that the pressure of the bearings lubricating oil was too low
at 0.2 bar, when it should be between 0.8 and 1.0 bar. The pressure was immediately adjusted to 0.8 bar,
which caused the bearings temperature at each measurement point fell about 8 C. So, the risk of an
unplanned emergency shutdown of the compressor was eliminated with these actions, avoiding huge
production losses.
On another machine, it was detected an increase of the liquid level in the compressor suction vessel and
after a quick action of maintenance and operation staff, the problem was solved, avoiding a serious
damage to the machine in case of liquid enter into compressor. In this case, the problem was related with
the valve of the vessel suction level control system.
The compressor efficiency can also be monitored over time with BR-compressor tool. This system is
a model based monitoring tool that calculates in real time from available sensors (flows, pressures,
temperatures, etc.) other inferred variables of the machines, for instance, the polytrophic head, polytrophic
efficiency, volumetric flow, etc. Thus, these inferred variables can also be monitored by surveillance
teams. In figure 11 is shown an example where there was detected a continuing degradation of the
machine efficiency of one compressor stage, and it was possible to estimate the remaining compressor
operating time without any major losses for the platform production efficiency. It was also possible to plan
appropriately the maintenance of this machine on time. This efficiency degradation can be associated, for
instance, with the effects of gas molecular weight variation due to a new production well, or due to fouling
or corrosion in the compressor, etc.

Figure 11—BR-Compressor Tool - compressor efficiency monitoring.

These examples show the gains to the compression system of these monitoring and surveillance
processes in terms of a higher availability and safety. The number of compressors and variables to be
monitored is too large, and the offshore staff has many other activities, so these remote onshore centers
can collaborate to increase a lot the operational efficiency of the production platforms.
The oil production platforms also have a set of critical pumps that should be monitored in order to
minimize operating and maintenance costs, increasing safety and ensuring a higher availability of these
important systems. Examples of critical pumps are water injection pumps, produced oil transfer pumps (to
pipeline or offloading), the uptake sea water pumps, etc. Figure 12 shows a monitoring room of the critical
pumps for production platforms.
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Figure 12—Monitoring room of the platform’s critical pumps.

As an example of the gains of this monitoring work, it could be mention a case of an export oil pump
from a semi-submersible platform that began to show high vibration. After expert analyzes, it was
identified that vibrations were caused by excessive internal recirculation due to an increase of the machine
clearances. So, it was possible to plan a little maintenance to be made on the platform, which could
minimize the problem, allowing operating this pump until the next overhaul of the platform, therefore
avoiding production losses.
Experts can also use to diagnose problems a tool called BR-Pump. This system collects automatically
information from sensors, like pressures, temperatures, vibrations RMS (root mean square), etc. Other
important data can be obtained by PDA (personal digital assistant), or entered manually in the system, for
example: analysis of lubricants, noise level near the pump, amount of lubricating oil uploaded, etc. These
data are handled through an inference engine to show the most plausible faults at the moment, generating
a report about the condition of the machine, and if necessary, an alert will be generated requiring a more
detailed assessment to be performed by an expert. Figure 13 shows the BR-Pump web interface where
users can define date to plot the operating points and compare with the machine design curves. One can
also verify how much time those pump operated at the recommended high efficiency region and how
much time at low efficiency regions, which will increase wear and tear of the equipment.

Figure 13—BR-Pump’s web interface.

The gains of this monitoring work of the critical pumps variables are resulting in lower operating and
maintenance costs. For instance, figure 14 shows a tendency of increasing mean time between failures
(MTBF) after the implementation of surveillance process of the three types of critical pumps: produced
oil transfer pumps, uptake sea water pumps and water injection pumps.
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Figure 14 —Better pumps’ MTBF (days) after the implementation of surveillance process.

Conclusion
Asset management is an important activity to ensure availability, safety and reduce operating costs of
offshore production platforms. Through constantly monitoring, it is possible to identify problems and
abnormal situations before they evolve to more serious faults. As shown in this paper, it is essential to
have effective tools for condition monitoring of critical equipment for production platform, in order to
track equipment and plant’s health and performance.
This paper presented many examples of the gains of these critical equipment surveillance and
monitoring procedures in terms of a higher availability, profitability and safety of offshore production
platforms. It also described some of the tools that are being used to monitor, identify, diagnose and
manage alerts during this monitoring process. These surveillance activities can help to avoid many
non-scheduled shutdowns of critical equipment that can increase wear and tear, therefore increasing
maintenance costs and also operational risks.
Offshore operators and maintenance teams are subject to many urgent operational demands that prevent
them, on many occasions, to realize deviations and trends in critical equipment variables. So, these remote
onshore centers can collaborate to increase operational efficiency of the production platforms, warning
early problems and abnormal situations in equipment. These onshore staff can also use different tools, for
example, dynamic and static simulators, optimizers, etc., to monitor, identify and diagnose problems.
They can also foster collaboration of different specialties (reservoir, production, process, automation,
turbo machinery, etc.) in regular meetings to discuss the problems in order to make a right diagnosis, and
define the better recommendations for the operating and maintenance teams. A key point for the
successful implementation of these monitoring processes is to create a reliable collaboration between
onshore and offshore teams and also between different disciplines.

Acknowledgments
We thank our fellows and colleagues from Petrobras, Brazilian Universities (UFRGS, UFRJ, UFRN,
UFMG, UFMS, UFCG, and UFF), Loguique and Trisolutions companies, who worked on this project. We
also would like to thank Petrobras for the permission to print this work.
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