Enhancing Rock Penetration Efficiency by a Novel Bio-inspired Drill

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Thanks to a bio-mimetic design idea, promoting a novel self-assisting/self-advancing feature, penetrating into soft and hard formations is foreseen to be performed with more reliability, less energy consumption, less maintenance, less required component and weight for the drill and hopefully less structural integrity concerns.

Employing this innovative approach favoring a continuous dual reciprocation action, such drill seemed to have the potential to harness the repeating percussive energy providing more ROP while demanding less WOB in compare to conventional methods in exploration drilling, typical task of industries such as oil & gas and geothermal energy.

On the other hand, eliminating the traditional rotary drilling action and replacing it with pure percussive one via such force transmitting hence reaction energy harvesting mechanism, wasted energy out of frictional and open end impacting systems can be reduced substantially.

Removing a great deal of costly rigs for rotation (torque) inducers, carrying the whole forcing and actuator unit via the moving compartment of the moving drill, paving the way for remotely controlled semi-automatic unmanned drilling device down the hole (or even fully robotized one), promising the chance for transporting the command, monitor and/or the whole control unit to safer zones such as onshore in case of offshore drilling, enhancing the maneuverability specially in complex-path directional drilling jobs, outperforming the traditional drills in horizontal drilling jobs where the force and torque transformations are currently the most important issues, eliminating many machine fatigue risks such as the so-called "dogleg effect", etc. are just some advantages that can be mentioned for this novel drill.

In the 1st illustration file the method and its novel self-assisting/self-advancing effect has been described. Essentially, in such method, each arm after settling its own impact job, via its own independent actuator, opts for assisting the other via the coupling mechanism thus adding to the other actuator effort for the next impact job. Gripping to the walls of the borehole, each arm can play the role of a temporary support as a consequence of its actuator receding movement leveraging the other arm movement. In case of lose support in this drill the situation would be a typical free reciprocating percussive drilling in a fixed position that can be artificially deepened via an external effort from upstream.

In the 2nd illustration two design schemes have been proposed, one inspired from the state of the art resembling the original bio-system and the other a new modified version adapted for harsh deep ocean environment of offshore drilling. It is noteworthy that using such new drills the traditional upstream rigs used to provide energy for penetration can be compactly adopted within the advancing drill housing leaving only the tasks of controlling to the external upstream responsibilities.

In the 3rd a brief summary of an optimization task is given regarding the drill arm topology and dill bit head topography for a trade-off solution targeting both efficient single impact penetration and promoting the said mechanism simultaneously (i.e. the two mentioned targets are in conflict when it comes to the bit shape).

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  • ABOUT THE ENTRANT

  • Name:
    Ardalan Amiri
  • Type of entry:
    individual
  • Profession:
    Engineer/Designer
  • Ardalan is inspired by:
    https://www.dropbox.com/s/dxh546160h6mb29/A.%20A.%20Intro%20and%20CV.pdf?dl=0
  • Patent status:
    none