Drilling parameters are really important when it comes to achieving great drilling performance and extended equipment life. While it is important to choose the right equipment, once drilling conditions change, you need to adjust your parameters to maintain good drilling performance. Understanding how to adjust drilling parameters can help drillers improve performance in difficult drilling situations.
You can find more information on our web, so please take a look.
Drilling parameters include the rate of penetration, the rotation speed, the water flow and the weight on bit (WOB) also known as feed pressure. All of these parameters work together to provide good performance. The gauges on your drill rig are there to help you monitor situations and adjust the parameters as needed.
There should be a minimum of three gauges on a drill rig: water pressure, feed pressure and torque pressure. They are integrated onto the control panel.
Water pressure
The water pressure gauge on the drill rig indicates the amount of pressure in the circuit. Beginning at the pump, the water flows through the high-pressure line to the water swivel, through the drill rods, past the bit, and unless lost to the ground formation, it travels back up the hole and out the casing back on the surface. Many things can affect water pressure including but not limited to, the ground formation, the gauge of your diamond tools, inner tube adjustment, condition of the drill rods, drilling techniques, type and size of coring system, etc. The water pressure gauge monitors these pressure changes, telling you what the in-hole pressure is. This pressure can be substantial (pressures can reach excess of psi) so these circuits are complete with a high-pressure relief valve or &#;Pop Valve&#; to protect the driller and helper against high pressure spikes while drilling
While you are drilling, you cannot change the water pressure &#; you can only monitor it, and you should be monitoring it closely. Water pressure is a telltale sign of what is going on down in the hole. For example, it it spikes, this is an indication that something is blocking the water from flowing. There could be a core block that is forcing the water shut off valves to push out and block the water flow. Of course, all of this only applies if you are drilling where there is water return.
The best way to manage your water pressure and avoid problems is to:
Torque pressure
coredrillpros. are exported all over the world and different industries with quality first. Our belief is to provide our customers with more and better high value-added products. Let's create a better future together.
Torque pressure is the amount of force applied to make the drill string turn. As with the water pressure gauge, this is not something a driller can control, but only monitor. The torque pressure will also provide valuable information regarding conditions in the bore hole because when the ground changes, the torque pressure can change as well.
For example, if you are drilling and your torque pressure is when you suddenly hit a clay seam, the torque pressure will increase to say, because the clay is preventing the bit from turning freely and the drill string is labouring hard to maintain the rotation speed and push on the bit. Similarly, if you hit a void, you will see the torque pressure drop because there is no pressure on the bit while is in a void.
Feed pressure
This gauge represents the hydraulic force being exerted on the drill bit as it advances through the rock, usually in pounds per square inch (PSI). Unlike the other two gauges above, the driller is able to control the pressure instead of only monitoring it. This value comes from the cylinder or cylinders that push the bit into the ground.
Drilling operation is one of the most critical parts of any exploration and developmental project. Operational costs related to drilling processes have increased substantially in the last ten years (Amer et al. ). A number of related actions have been stimulated by the high costs, which involve more than half of the budget of any field development plans (Lashari et al. ). Therefore, drilling engineers and operations teams are often motivated to reduce the well drilling duration and associated costs. Drilling optimization has an important role in improving drilling performance and reducing unnecessary drilling costs. These issues influence drilling time, the drilling rig&#;s productivity, and, consequently, increase the profitability of oil and gas projects (Mohammed et al. ).
Numerous methods such as optimizing ROP, mechanical specific energy (MSE), the torque on bit (TOB), and cost per foot of drilling have been developed for drilling optimization (Hegde and Gray ). Although all these methods aim to enhance and achieve the best drilling performance, the ROP optimization methods are the most commonly used (Arabjamaloei and Shadizadeh ). However, high ROP does not always correspond to enhanced drilling performance. It is significant to know that high ROP may lead to improper hole cleaning, jeopardize bit life, and result in wellbore instability problems, etc. (Abbas et al. ). All of this may extend the time of well delivery and lead to a problematic scenario when more complicated operations occur due to wellbore instability and collapse (Akgun ). Unfortunately, this will increase the non-productive time and the well cost, accordingly. Consequently, it is crucial to adjust the relationship between the drilling rate and the related variables to improve drilling efficiency while maintaining safe practices.
The optimization procedure classically emphasizes increasing the ROP, which can be simply defined as the progress of a bit into rocks in time units (Eskandarian et al. ). In general, ROP is surveyed instantaneously by measuring the constrained time and distance during drilling. Maximizing ROP can be achieved by fully understanding the major variables that could directly or indirectly affect the drilling rate (Chen et al. ). However, prediction and optimization of penetration rate is still a significant challenge within the petroleum industry due to the complicated and nonlinear performance of variables with ROP (Perrin et al. ; Bataee and Mohseni ). Additionally, some of these variables cannot be changed without influencing the others, making it challenging to assess the real impact of an individual variable on the ROP (Elkatatny et al. ).
Based on the information provided in the literature and according to the field experience, the most important variables have been identified as rig/bit associated variables, associated mud variables, and formation variables (Yi et al. ; Hankins et al. ; Shi et al. ). These variables can be classified into two comprehensive categories: controllable parameters and uncontrollable or environmental parameters (Elkatatny ). The controllable parameters can be changed immediately to improve the ROP without negatively affecting the economics of the operations substantially, such as pipe weight force exerted on the bit (WOB), revolutions per minute (RPM), flow rate (FR), and total flow area (Keshavarz Moraveji and Naderi ; Abbas et al. ). While, the uncontrollable parameters are challenging to adjust due to economic or geological reasons such as the rock formation, which defines the constraints that affect the selection of the mud weight and type, wellbore azimuth and inclination, pore pressure gradient, unconfined compressive strength, and the three principal stresses (Kahraman et al. ; Ataei et al. ; Al-AbdulJabbar et al. ).
Among all the previous variables, WOB, RPM, and FR, known as the controllable operational drilling parameters, play an important role in the drilling operation, as they can influence ROP (Edalatkhah et al. ). Several direct and indirect traditional methods have been used to optimize these parameters for improving the productivity of the drilling process (Arabjamaloei et al. ; Ahmed et al. ). The direct method (drill rate and drill-off tests) relies mostly on human drilling experience and available standards developed in the field. In this method, the controllable drilling parameters can be continuously adjusted by the drilling engineer at the surface to identify the founder point at which the drilling rate is maximized (Dupriest and Koederitz ). This method can also be used to protect downhole tools from excessive vibrations, dysfunctions, and stick&#;slip.
In contrast, several models and formulae have been developed to predict the penetration rate. In the past, fundamental physics and mathematical equations and empirical components derived from multiple regression analysis of the field data have been applied to establish a relation between the most influential variables and ROP (Bourgoyne and Young ; Warren ; Winters et al. ). However, these traditional models could result in low accuracy and comprehensive ROP estimation (Bodaghi et al. ; Soares et al. ). The empirical method's implementation has some disadvantages, such as the determination of the empirical constants, bit specifications, the requirement for auxiliary data, and unsatisfactory accuracy in ROP predictions (Hegde et al. ). In the previous few years, the development in drilling technology led to the implementation of more predictive data-driven approaches, which are purely based on actual field data. These approaches, such as the broader windows statistical learning model, integrate machine learning for drilling rate prediction (Payette et al. ; Wallace et al. ; Hegde et al. ). An important characteristic regarding the machine learning method is its ability to generalize outcomes based only on the knowledge contained in a training dataset. As a result, these methods have been used to address system identification and function approximation difficulties, such as the one focused herein, which is strongly associated with discovering a reliable ROP prediction model.
Nonetheless, most previous studies have analyzed the dataset from drilled well to develop models for ROP prediction. The procedure shown in this study leverages the constant finding of all possible optimum combinations of controllable operational drilling parameters to maximize ROP. First, a total number of cases were gathered from several drilled wells in Southern Iraq. The operational controllable drilling parameters collected as the input dataset contain WOB, RPM, and FR. Then, RSM methodology was used to develop mathematical and statistical regression models to model and optimize ROP subject to the main three drilling parameters, namely WOB, RPM, and FR. Finally, the optimal WOB, RPM, and FR were selected to create better drilling efficiency by reducing drilling time and well costs for the future well on the same pad.
For more information, please visit Surface Drill Rigs.