Bottom hole pressure control for oil well drilling using model reference adaptive control

In this paper, we use a recently derived model reference adaptive controller (MRAC) for controlling the bottom hole pressure (BHP) in an oil well. The proposed scheme uses the propagation delay in the well as part of the design, while continuously adapting to uncertain frictional terms in the system. The proposed scheme is through simulations on an industrial hydraulic MPD simulator compared with a conventional PI controller for BHP set-point changes. In fast set-point changes the MRAC controller exhibits less tracking error and less oscillations than the conventional PI solution.