A time-optimal wellbore trajectory design for slide drilling systems

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A time-optimal wellbore trajectory design for slide drilling systems Xiao-Yu Zhong1,2 · Jia-Peng Liu1,3 · Kai-Dong Chen1 · Jia-Qi Chen1 · Ning-Yu Wang4 · Chun-Wang He3 · Qiu-Hai Lu1 · Zai-Bin Cheng5 · Wen-Jun Huang6 Received: 23 April 2020 / Revised: 20 August 2020 / Accepted: 24 August 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020

Abstract For decades, the slide drilling system (SDS) has played a critical role in the area of directional drilling. Drilling in the sliding mode is much more time-consuming than drilling in the rotating mode for a SDS. Therefore, it generally takes more time to drill a curved wellbore segment than a straight segment of the same length. Based on this fact, a novel wellbore trajectory design for SDSs is proposed in this paper to reduce the total drilling time and improve economy. The basic idea of our strategy is to replace a long curved wellbore section, e.g., the build-up and drop-off sections, with a series of short circular-arc and straight-line segments in the design stage. Assuming that rotating and sliding modes are only used for straight-line and circular-arc segments, respectively, the total drilling time is reduced by increasing the average rate of penetration. Therefore, the problem lies in how to replace a long circular arc with multiple short circular arcs and straight lines to minimize the total drilling time, which is the aim of this research. In this paper, a piecewise trial strategy is proposed, where the optimized wellbore trajectory is generated by adding circular-arc and straight-line segments with equal length one by one according to the “line first” principle. This strategy converts the original optimization problem, which involves both combinatorial and parameter optimization of unknown dimension, to a much easier one, where there are only three design variables and one set of constraint equations. Due to the multimodal characteristics of the objective function, genetic algorithm (GA) is adopted to obtain the optimal solution. A great reduction of the drilling time is obtained by applying our method to two typical cases, which shows a clear potential for future field applications. Keywords Slide drilling system · Wellbore trajectory optimization · Alternate sliding and rotating · Piecewise trial strategy · Genetic algorithm Responsible Editor: Emilio Carlos Nelli Silva Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00158-020-02732-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.  Jia-Peng Liu

[email protected] 1

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

2

Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100090, China

3

Department of Mechanical Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60201, USA

4

Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA

5

China National Offshore Oil Corporation Research

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