Optimal Control of Directional Drilling Process

As drilling environment is getting more challenging, with deeper, high pressure high temperature formation, and rough environment, ensuring that the bit direction following the planned and desired well path is very crucial in order to penetrate the reservoir targets. Current drilling operation employs the use of manual mode control of bit movement. Unfortunately, this manual mode of control may lead to some problem that arises from operational and human inaccuracies which make the actual path differ from the desired one.
This project will present a proposed algorithm and control strategy for automatic guidance of bit movement in directional drilling process where the knowledge of drilling operation and control system are being applied. In order to develop an optimal control strategy in guiding the bit movement, the kinematic and dynamic model of the drill string and bit movement has been derived at the first stage. Two dynamic system was analyzed in this study; the torsional behavior of the drill string and gyro model of the MWD system. In the second step, by using Matlab-Simulink Software, the system’s kinematic and dynamic equations is model and simulate to predict the system’s behavior. The result from the simulation is then analyzed and studied in order to determine the ability and limitation of the designed control system. It is shown that the proposed control system can generate an appropriate well path and hit the specified target. This automatic control system helps in reducing human and operational error which results in more accurate well path being generated while drilling.