| Summary: | Sand production is a common complex problem in the oil and gas industry, and choke valves is typically suffering for this in form of erosive damage. The degree of erosive damage is decided by many different factors where the flow rate velocity and the sand rate are the most important ones. Much effort has been spent on ways of reducing the choke erosion to be able to maintain the oil and gas production at an optimal level with attention to increased profit, safety and availability. Use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has been essential in this work by simulating flow through the choke valve for optimizing the choke design, choosing the optimal erosion resistant material, coming up with improved erosion-related models, and optimal operational procedures of the choke. Producing with Acceptable Sand Rate (ASR), which means allowing a certain degree of sand erosion in chokes, have proven to be a successful way of maintaining the oil and gas production at an optimal level. To satisfy ASR-production, demands are made on an optimal use of condition and performance monitoring equipment and tools. The use of the condition and performance monitoring tool INSIGHT (from ABB) has in general proven to be successful for satisfying the ASR-production on different Statoil fields, including Statfjord which is in this thesis the area of focus regarding the use of INSIGHT. Important condition monitoring data such as sand rate, flow rate and pressure necessary to say something about the choke erosion status in INSIGHT must be as good as possible, because the quality of the results are limited by quality of the input data. In this thesis, INSIGHT has been presented, discussed and tested to be able to come up with possible limitations and improvements with special attention to condition monitoring (input) data used in INSIGHT.
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