Prevention of Casing Heading in Gas Lift Under Uncertainty Using the Square Root Unscented Kalman Filter for State and Parameter Estimation.

Gas lift is one of the most common artificial lift methods used to enhance oil well production. Oscillations in production flow rate, known as casing heading instability, are a common issue in gas lift systems. Designing an automatic control system is a recommended solution to prevent casing heading and improve the performance of a gas lift system. One of the major challenges in designing such a control system is the uncertainty of the system parameters and state variables. In this paper, the analytical gas lift model presented in previous studies was modified to account for the real gas flow in the annulus. Then, a parameter estimator and a state observer were designed using a square root Kalman filter to estimate the uncertain parameter and state variables. The simulation results have shown that the improved model is more reliable. The designed Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) control, along with the estimator and observer, can stabilize the gas lift system under uncertain conditions. The main contribution of this work is the development of an integrated system for controlling and estimating the gas lift system. This system ensures reliable performance even in the presence of changes in wellbore and reservoir conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]