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Efficient and high-fidelity steering ability prediction of a slender drilling assembly

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Abstract

In drilling engineering, it is extremely challenging to drill a prescribed wellbore over several thousand meters. One of the main difficulties arises from accurately predicting and controlling the directional drilling performance, caused by the complex nonlinear dynamics of the slender drilling assembly and its interactions with the surrounding rocks. Nowadays, the simplified analytical geometry method, which has been adopted as the industry standard, can merely offer a rough estimation of the drilling direction, while the high-accuracy finite element method is computationally inefficient. This study is intended to provide a straightforward prediction of the drilling direction for a long drilling distance accurately and efficiently by proposing a dynamical simulation method based on the flexible multibody approach. Three techniques were adopted to achieve the critical objective of the paper. First, an Arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian formulation was used to provide a new approach to balance the efficiency and accuracy. Additionally, it can perfectly simulate the realistic drilling operation that drill pipes are continuously added to the drill string one by one through dynamically inserting new beam elements into the existing model. Second, the whole drill string and its interaction with the wellbore were all considered to carry out a high-fidelity simulation. Finally, the bit–rock interaction model was introduced to offer a straightforward way of evaluating the steerability of drilling assemblies. The presented method and model were validated by the consistency between the simulated wellbore trajectory and the in-field experimental data and are ready to be applied in drilling tools design, real-time drilling simulation, and drilling direction control.

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Acknowledgements

This research was financially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 11872221, 11302114, and 11432008), National Science and Technology Major Project of China (Grant No. 2016ZX05025-002), National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2017YFC0307100) and the National Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2015CB251203); their support is highly appreciated. The authors also thank Tiffany Wu, Garrett Andrews, Laura Hernandez, and Brianna Willis in Northwestern University and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on this paper.

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  1. Kai-Dong Chen and Jia-Qi Chen contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Engineering Mechanics, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Kai-Dong Chen, Jia-Qi Chen, Xiao-Yu Zhong, Qiu-Hai Lu, Jia-Peng Liu, Zhi-Hua Zhao & Ge-Xue Ren

  2. CNPC Drilling Research Institute, Beijing, 102206, China

    Di-Feng Hong

  3. CNOOC Research Institute Co., Ltd., Beijing, 100028, China

    Zai-Bin Cheng

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  1. Kai-Dong Chen
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Chen, KD., Chen, JQ., Hong, DF. et al. Efficient and high-fidelity steering ability prediction of a slender drilling assembly. Acta Mech 230, 3963–3988 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00707-019-02460-5

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