Waterflooding is a recovery technique where water is pumped into an oil reservoir for increase inproduction. Changing reservoir states will require different injection and production settings foroptimal operation which can be formulated as a dynamic optimization problem. This could be solvedthrough optimal control techniques which traditionally can only provide an open-loop solution.However, this solution is sensitive to uncertainties which is inevitable to reservoirs. Direct feedbackcontrol has been proposed recently for optimal waterflooding operations with the aim to counteractthe effects of reservoir uncertainties. In this work, a feedback approach based on the principleof receding horizon control (RHC) was developed for waterflooding process optimization. Applicationof RHC strategy to counteract the effect of uncertainties has yielded gains that vary from 0.14%to 19.22% over the traditional open-loop approach. The gain increases with introduction of moreuncertainties into the configuration. The losses incurred as a result of the effect of feedback is in therange of 0.25%–15.21% in comparison to 0.39%–31.51% for the case of traditional open-loop controlapproach.
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