ALEXANDRIA, Va., Nov. 6 -- United States Patent no. 12,460,520, issued on Nov. 4, was assigned to PETROLEO BRASILEIRO S.A.-PETROBRAS (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil).
"Controller for suppressing slugs in petroleum production systems" was invented by Dinart Duarte Braga (Vitoria, Brazil).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "The invention solves the problem of the difficulty of acquiring subsea variables by using a widely available surface variable, namely the pressure upstream of the choke valve. As surface variables have an unfavorable dynamic for use in conventional anti-slug controllers, which are based on the linear PID algorithm, the proposed controller uses a hybrid fuzzy-PID architecture, which compen...