Features selection for recognition of severe slugging in a long pipeline with an S-shaped riser by decision tree.

In deep-sea oil and gas, S-shaped riser is the key equipment to transport the multiphase working substance produced underwater to the surface platform. The occurrence of severe slugging will seriously threaten the safe production of offshore oil and gas fields. Therefore, accurate and rapid recognition of hazardous flow patterns such as severe slugging is an urgent need to ensure the safety of multiphase flow in deep-sea long-distance pipelines. This paper has built a set of long S-shaped riser with industrial parameters, including 1687 m horizontal and downward inclined pipelines and 16.7 m S-shaped riser. The gas-liquid two-phase flow patterns, including severe slugging, oscillating flow and stable flow, are studied in this system. The pressure and differential pressure features of different signals are extracted from different positions along the pipeline, and a more comprehensive and reasonable evaluation criterion of signal performance is established. Making use of the advantages of visualization of the structure of decision tree, a new method to evaluate the recognition effect of features is proposed based on its classification principle. The original signal is decomposed into components of different scales through wavelet multi-scale analysis, and then the statistical features with good flow pattern differentiation ability are calculated. It is found that the mean of wavelet approximate component has the best recognition effect among all features. On the basis of feature correlation analysis, 7 features with high recognition rate applicable to 22 signals along the pipeline are optimally selected from 13 original features. For the water differential pressure signal DP 13 , the recognition rate obtained by using its 4 optimal features is 91.4 %, and the error between the recognition rate obtained by using all features is only 0.2 %. The overall recognition rate of the signal is the highest and the practicability is the best. When the sample duration is 6.2s, the recognition rate using the optimal feature reaches 90.8 %, thus ensuring the real-time recognition of the flow pattern while obtaining a high recognition rate. • Two-phase flow patterns are studied on a 1687 m long pipeline with an S-shaped riser. • Decision tree is used to rank features based on effect of flow pattern recognition. • Mean of wavelet approximation component is the best feature to identify flow pattern. • Obtained features with good recognition rate for all signals by correlation analysis. • Recognition rate using optimal features reaches 90.8 % with a sample length of 6.2s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]