Sensor Network based Oil Well Health Monitoring and Intelligent Control

Most oil pumping units (OPUs) have been using manual control in the oilfield. This existing oil-pumping system, a high power-consuming process, has the incapability of OPUs structural health monitoring. In this paper, a sensor network based intelligent control is proposed for power economy and efficient oil well health monitoring. The proposed sensor network consists of three-level sensors1) several types of basic sensors, such as load sensor, angular sensor, voltage sensor, current sensor and oil pressure sensor, which are the first level sensors (FLS), are used for oil well data sensing, 2) our developed intelligent sensors (IS), which belong to the second level sensor, are designed mainly for an oil wells data elementary processing, main fault alarm/indication, typical data storage/indication, data/status transmission up to the third level sensor (TLS), data/status transmission between IS, and command transmission down to the OPU motor, and 3) our developed software-defined (SD) control centers with an embedded database, i. e. , the TLS, are designed for hundreds of oil wells data storage/management, data processing, malfunction detection, malfunction alarm/indication, stroke-adjustment command transmission down to a specific IS for power economy and the malfunction report to the maintenance staff via global system for mobile communications (GSM) short message service ( SMS