Low-Pressure Line Control for Automatic Pressure Testing Applied in Oil and Gas Industry

The offshore Oil & Gas industry is looking for innovative solutions to reduce production costs associated with downtime and the maintenance of facilities and equipment, such as valves and actuators. For instance, this industry is recently shifting from hydraulic-type to electrical-type actuators for fundamental reasons, including reduced costs and faster operation. However, most of the time, these valves are manually or hydraulicly operated. These valves compose the Hydraulic Power Unit (HPU) responsible for providing hydraulic fluid to serve subsea systems. Hydraulic pressure could be used to simulate the process, water depth, and operations as valves open and close, torque tools, among other applications. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to model and develop a control and automation system capable of making pressure ramps using the low-pressure system of the HPU. The results showed the potentiality of the proposed system to automate a low-pressure system with the integration between VFD, supervisory, controller, and SQL database.