Subsea systems are prone to degradation and failures since they are located in complex and harsh environments. Due to the inaccessibility, field inspections and maintenance on subsea systems are costly (often requiring replacement of whole subsea modules) and cannot be carried out without a certain delay. Thus, it is crucial to estimate a component’s remaining useful life (RUL) with a specific confidence interval. By predicting the evolution of the component's degradation level over time, we can estimate the probable time to failure, thus offering a frame to support the decision-makers on whether or when to fix or replace a component or module.

This project's first objective is to develop prototype simulators to estimate RUL for subsea choke valves that suffer from erosion due to sand production in mature fields. A health indicator of the erosion process is the difference between the initial (as new condition) and estimated actual valve flow coefficients (Cv), a relative measure of the efficiency to control the fluid flow. When the difference finally passes a predefined threshold, the choke cannot execute its function correctly and needs to be replaced.