In sucker-rod pumping wells, due to the lack of an early diagnosis of operating condition or sensor faults, several problems can go unnoticed. These problems can increase downtime and production loss. In these wells, the diagnosis of operation conditions is carried out through downhole dynamometer cards, via pre-established patterns, with human visual effort in the operation centers. Starting with machine learning algorithms, several papers have been published on the subject, but it is still common to have doubts concerning the difficulty level of the dynamometer card classification task and best practices for solving the problem. In the search for answers to these questions, this work carried out sixty tests with more than 50,000 dynamometer cards from 38 wells in the Mossoró, RN, Brazil. In addition, it presented test results for three algorithms (decision tree, random forest and XGBoost), three descriptors (Fourier, wavelet and card load values), as well as pipelines provided by automated machine learning. Tests with and without the tuning of hypermeters, different levels of dataset balancing and various evaluation metrics were evaluated. The research shows that it is possible to detect sensor failures from dynamometer cards. Of the results that will be presented, 75% of the tests had an accuracy above 92% and the maximum accuracy was 99.84%.

In wells that operate by electrical submersible pump (ESP), the use of automation tools becomes essential in the interpretation of data. However, the fact that the wells work with automated systems does not guarantee the early diagnosis of operating conditions. The analysis of amperimetric charts is one of the ways to identify fail conditions. Generally, the analysis of these histographics is performed by operators who are often overloaded, generating a decrease in the efficiency of observing the well operating conditions. Currently, technologies based on machine learning (ML) algorithms create solutions to early diagnose abnormalities in the well’s operation. Thus, this work aims to provide a proposal for detecting the operating conditions of the ESP pump from electrical current data from 24 wells in the city of Mossoró, Rio Grande do Norte state, Brazil. The algorithms used were Decision Tree, Support Vector Machine, K-Nearest Neighbor and Neural Network. The algorithms were tested without and with hyperparameter tuning based on a training dataset. The results confirm that the application of the ML algorithm is feasible for classifying the operating conditions of the ESP pump, as all had an accuracy greater than 87%, with the best result being the application of the SVM model, which reached an accuracy of 93%.