Abstract: In this paper， based on the system for monitoring sand produced in offshore heave oil wells， a sensor
highly sensitive to the vibration intensity of the grain impacting the sheet metal is designed， and also the way to
collect these signals during the sand monitoring experiment. Using a piezoelectric acceleration sensor to tell the
high-frequency vibration signal caused by the sand impact， and analyzing the sand signal in frequency domain and
time domain by applying the signal processing. The experiment for different sand contents in the heave oil（the
viscosity is higher than 100 mPa·s）is successful under the laboratory condition. The results show， if the grain size
of sample and sand transport flow velocity are the same， and with the increase of sand content， the power spectrum
amplitude， the root-mean-square value and the variance of sand monitoring signal increase as well.

Key words: monitoring sand in heave oil, sand content, high-frequency vibration signal, piezoelectric accelerationsensor