Robustness Analysis and Tuning for Pressure Control in Managed Pressure Drilling

In this paper, we present a general framework for robustness analysis for pressure control in managed pressure drilling (MPD). In particular, we apply the analysis to the pressure controller proposed in the work Godhavn et al. (2011), based on which we also give an approach to search for controller tuning parameters with the goal of maximizing the robustness of system stability and control performance to various sorts of uncertainties, disturbances and noise. The resulting tuning table can be used for online computation of the controller parameters. The method proves effective in a simulation study.