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Case Study:
Crown Energy Technologies, Calgary, Canada

Leading innovation in advanced control systems
Auto Pumper: Advanced Pumper Controls for Oil Well Fracturing

Summary

Advanced Measurements (an NI Select Alliance Partner) together with Crown Energy Technologies (a leading manufacturer of oilfield equipment) have introduced Auto Pumper - a very advanced pumping control system which controls the flow of high pressure slurry through 6 independent pumper units up to 1,500 HP each.

Details

The control system contains two banks of NI Compact Fieldpoint hardware with cFP-2020 controllers running LabVIEW RT software. Fifteen analog and digital I/O modules are connected to approximately 200 total I/O points to monitor and control pressure, flowrate, and engine operating parameters.

The system provides the operator with manual, semi-automatic, and fully automatic control modes. In automatic mode, the system reads a series of pre-programmed job stages, and the control algorithm synchronizes the engine throttle setting and transmission shifting for all 6 pumps to maintain very stable flow conditions. In manual mode the operator can control the flowrate and pressure for each pumper independently, with the control system still providing safety monitoring and emergency stop functions.

The system incorporates a 15 msec loop rate monitoring for overpressure conditions on the main supply line (up to 20,000 PSI). The control algorithm is designed for a high degree of fault tolerance, and will accommodate operating variations from any of the pumps up to and including a complete dropout of any vehicle. The entire job duration (1 to 8 hours) is logged and can be replayed for presentation and reporting.

Benefits

With this sophisticated control system, oil well fracturing contractors can deliver substantially better quality results – pressure and flowrate are maintained at more stable levels throughout the job than with previous technologies. Maintenance and operating costs are substantially reduced because all the engines and transmissions are operated smoothly at optimized levels, not subjected to damaging speed variations.

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