Sistema de espectroscopia de impedância para caracterização de fluidos

Abstract

Many are the challenges when it comes to offshore hydrocarbon extraction. Flow assurance is the area of study that targets to maintain a continuous, efficient and secure fluid (oil or gas) stream from the well head to separation systems. Gas hydrates - crystalline ice-like structures that form in certain temperature and pressure condition - deposition in pipelines is one of the main problems to this area, they agglutinate inside the pipeline and tend to clog the flow leading to operation shutdown. With the increasing depth of oil wells, higher are the risks associated with flow assurance failures. Thus, hydrate formation studies and inhibition studies are still pertinent, but there is still few low-cost equipment for hydrate formation study. This paper describes an impedance spectroscopy system whose target is fluid characterization as a given step for future hydrate characterization. The system is composed by data-acquisition hardware that takes measures from the fluid being measured; and an embedded system for signal processing and further transmission to a visualization station. Experiments have been performed with both the developed system and a commercial reference system, running from 1 kHz to 5Mhz for both water and oil. Furthermore, experiments have been made for characterization of ice formation. The results showed to be promising since the developed equipment measured similar values to those from the commercial system. Also, it was showed that with some improvements the system will be able to perform ice characterization without human intervention.