SPE WA Lecture: Drilling Response of Impregnated Diamond Bits: Challenges and Opportunities

Drilling Response of Impregnated Diamond Bits: Challenges and Opportunities

Drilling industry has been facing challenges associated with drilling hard and abrasive formations, where low drilling performance and short bit life lead to low rate of penetrations and number of trips. The drilling efficiency can be improved by using Impregnated Diamond (ID) bit, where the performance of bit can be sustained and bit life can be prolonged by sharpening processes replacing the old and blunt diamonds by sharp ones embedded in a bonding matrix. Although being used frequently in hard rock drilling, full potentials of ID bits have not been achieved in the field due to lack of understanding of the cutting and wear mechanisms dominating the ID bit response.

In this presentation, the outcomes of a phenomenological research on the drilling action of ID bits are introduced. The results show that there are two dominant mechanisms mobilised at diamond/rock interface yielding to three drilling regimes. The understanding of the drilling regimes can be used to infer information regarding the bit wear status, drilling performance, cleaning and optimum operating condition. The presentation covers various cutting and drilling experiments performed in the lab as well as field, on five different rock samples using more than 40 different ID bit and segment designs.

Presenter

Dr. Mostofi is a researcher and lecturer at Petroleum Engineering Department of Curtin University. In the last five years in Curtin, he has been collaborating with Deep Exploration Technology Corporative Research Centre and CSIRO in hard rock drilling research. Particularly, he has been working on diamond bit/rock interaction, drilling optimisation, hole cleaning and depth discrimination of cuttings. Examples of these collaborations are development of a drilling model for interpretation and optimisation of diamond bit drilling, and a number of field tests optimising the drilling performance and validating state of the art lab studies. When it comes to teaching, he has been lecturer of Drilling units in bachelor’s and masters’ programs.

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