2019 Sucker Rod Pumping

Workshop
Cox Convention Center, Oklahoma City, OK
September 9 - 12, 2019

Dynamic Load Cell Calibration

– or –
The identification of potentially
miscalibrated load cell offset
Walter Phillips
 Key Point
 Here’s the whole presentation in one slide…
 You should allow the
calculated pump cards
to float left/right
Gibbs, 1963
Predicting the Behavior of
Sucker-Rod Pumping Systems

~1973 we started aligning the

surface & pump cards

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Oklahoma City, OK
 Benefits of dynamic position
 Understand pump spacing
 See 2016 presentation
Dynamic Relative
Rod Stretch

 Position and load are forever intertwined

 If the load is off, that tweaks calculated position

This is important!

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 How to calculate a pump card
 Finite difference method – See SPE #18189
 Remove static loads (Rwf)
 First row is measured position
 Hooke’s Law to get 2nd row
 Taylor Series to get next rows
 At the bottom, get load from
calculated displacement

This is the These are all

secret sauce relative positions
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 Load Affects Position
 Each calculated down-hole point depends
on the previously calculated points
 If we kick off the algorithm with shifted loads,
the calculated positions will also be shifted
 Then we calculate the down-hole loads
based on those shifted positions

 Lots of fun math-y

hand waving
2019 Sucker Rod Pumping
Sept. 9 - 12, 2019 5
Workshop Oklahoma City, OK
 Dynamic Load Cell Calibration
 Patent pending, etc.
 If the load input to the finite difference
method is incorrect, the pump card
will be shifted on the diagonal
 Improperly calibrated load cells can be
identified from the erroneous data
 Assumes we only care about the load cell offset
 Load span is a different problem
 But somewhat related since we are See animation
reading loads in the upper range in a few slides

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 Visual Load Offset Example

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 Another Load Offset Example

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 What about the load span?

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 Span from correct minimum…

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 And Position? (Just for fun)
Positions obviously don’t get shifted quite like this in real life

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 Static Snapshots

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 Static Snapshots

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 Static Snapshots

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 Pitfalls
 Load values can be off for different reasons
 Incorrect rod specs
 Generally identifiable through other means
 Deviation / Friction / Side-loading
 Manifests in different areas of the card
 Incorrect load input is assumed to be constant
(unlike load effects from friction, which are dynamic)
 Incorrect fluid gradient / buoyancy
 Relatively easy to check / test
 This method can help identify those wells

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 Incorrect Load Cell Span
 Yet another way the pump card can tilt
 May be tubing anchor
 May be pump slippage
 May be incorrect position (etc.)
 …Or it may be the load cell span tilting the card

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 How do I know if the card is at zero?

 Damping factors, friction, etc. distort the card

 Dipping below zero doesn’t necessarily
mean the loadcell is mis-calibrated
 Load and position of the
pump card gives a clue
 Remember, incorrect surface load
moves the pump card on a diagonal
 Other variables don’t move the plot
on a clean diagonal (mostly)
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 Benefits
 Load is a critical safety factor
 Did you overload your gearbox because the load
cell was reading lower than actual loads?
 How would you even know?
 Since this method operates on existing data,
it can be easily deployed at the SCADA level
 Alerts on wells that “may” be out of spec
 Maybe do some forensic analysis on failures?

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Additional Benefit
 This method can identify the magnitude
of offset miscalibration
 Integrate this offset value back to the POC
 Obviously requires POC implementation
 Sam controllers have this setting, but Patent
Pending

no way to determine the correct value

 Consider a load cell that reads high
 Set points may be configured accordingly high
 What happens when the calibration is fixed?
 Is the high2019load
Sucker
shutdown
Rod Pumping
setting
Workshop Oklahoma
reduced?
City, OK
Sept. 9 - 12, 2019 19
 Conclusion
 Free your pump cards’ position!
 Your pump cards want to be free
 Pump cards shifted on the diagonal
“may” indicate improper load readings
 Easy way to identify/classify problematic wells
(load cell, fluid gradient, incorrect rod string, etc.)

 Identifying faulty data from

faulty data is kind of cool
https://xkcd.com/552/

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Oklahoma City, OK
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Oklahoma City, OK