Sentech AS products

While DP and guided wave radar level transmitters – and even mechanical floaters and visual gauges – serve their purpose in light, sweet crudes and generally when water separates easily from oil, heavier and more viscous crude oils introduce much more complex layers and less defined levels in production separators.

The Sentech Water Cut Meter is the only brand on the market that can be installed in-line and measure from 0 – 100% Water across the whole circumference of any pipe diameter – even 24” and larger. This allows operators to take advantage of existing pipe routing, and avoids the requirement for extra piping, flanges and valves for bypass arrangements.

Ideally, subsea equipment – including Subsea Control Modules – should be installed and left to operate continuously for the duration of the field design life. In the real world, operators suffer vessel cost and lost production due to Subsea Control Module failures. Sometimes, those failures are caused by seawater that had slowly been leaking into the control module canister until it shorts the electronic circuits.

In onshore and topside offshore fields, water cut meters and probes have been used for nearly 50 years, and is a commodity that in some form or shape is deployed in nearly all conventional oil field developments. However, most water cut meters are designed for two-phase (oil & water) applications, while most subsea fields transport unprocessed multiphase flow to the surface. The traditional requirement for water cut meters for processing facilities applications (e.g. production separators) are thus rarely found subsea. For the same reason, most major suppliers have been slow to adapt their technology for subsea use.