Mechanical micro machining is an emerging material removal process in precision manufacturing industries. There are challenges involved in micro drilling of difficult to cut alloys. These relate to the development of a feasible and reliable manufacturing process given the fragile nature of the micro drill and the poor machinability of difficult to cut materials. Moreover, the established knowledge of macro scale machining may not be directly transferable into micro machining domain. Therefore, mechanical micro machining needs to be adapted to a specific application. Currently, electrical discharge machining (EDM) is an established industrial process for making micro holes in nickel alloys. The mechanical micro drilling process is at present being considered for improved surface integrity, better hole definition and high productivity. Considering the potential of mechanical micro drilling process in nickel based super alloys, the research presented in this thesis focused on developing a novel micro drilling strategy and a process window. Having developed the process window and selected optimum tool geometry, workpiece surface integrity was evaluated at various cutting conditions. Mechanical and microstructural characterization of the modified layers was conducted using electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD), focused ion beam (FIB), backscatter election (BSE), transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and nano-indentation techniques. The mechanisms behind the generation of these modified layers were revealed. The effects of various feedrates, cutting speeds and tool edge radius were analyzed under dry and wet cutting conditions. A new and novel contribution to modified material microstructure analysis was presented in dry and wet drilling conditions. Furthermore, important findings were presented on the tool-chip and tool-workpiece cutting zones. This research provides a comprehensive picture of the surface integrity definition of the micro hole features in drilling nickel based super alloys. Since nickel based super alloys are known for their poor machinability, tool life becomes an important economic variable. For this purpose, tool wear was studied in the micro machining domain. A new tool wear map was developed on a feed-speed plane, identifying low tool wear zones at high productivity. Wear mechanisms were identified which contributed to better understanding of tool-workpiece interactions. A range of different heat resistant and wear resistant coatings were tested which helped identifying the critical material requirements of machining these alloys. Finally, after having developed a complete set of requirements for the mechanical micro drilling process in terms of process window, suitable tool geometry, workpiece surface integrity, tool wear evaluation and selection of suitable coatings for the micro drilling process; the surface integrity produced by mechanical drilling was compared with EDM and laser drilling processes. Mechanical and microstructural character of surface and subsurface layers was assessed. Comparison of surface integrity parameters showed that the mechanical micro drilling process has the potential to benefit industry making micro size holes with better hole definition and surface integrity. This work is an important contribution to industry in that it presents process feasibility assessment and characterization and is regarded by the industrial partners as having achieved Manufacturing Capability Readiness Level (MCRL) 3.

A project report submitted to the Faculty of Engineering, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Engineering. / The flushing flow rate required to maximise penetration rate of holes drilled by rotary percussion is dependant on drilling parameters and chip size. Experimental work to determine the optimal flushing water flow rate for two common drilling situations was undertaken. It consisted of drilling, analysis of chip samples and flow visualization. A computer modal to predict flow rate was developed. Its output and the experimental results Were combined to explain the relationship between penetration rate and flow rate. All chips should be fiushed from the gap between the bit and the end of the hole in the time between hammer blows (ie. - within the duration of a percussion cycle). As flow rate increases, flushing improves and therefore penetration rate increases. Once flushing is adequate there is no mechanism for further increases in penetration rate, thus it remains constant and independent of further increases in flow. / Andrew Chakane 2018

The supply and demand situation is crucial for the oil and gas industry during the first half of the 21st century. For the future, we will see two trends going in opposite directions: a decline in discoveries of conventional oil and gas reservoirs and an increase in world energy demand. Therefore, the need to develop and produce unconventional oil and gas resources, which encompass coal-bed methane, gas-shale, tight sands and heavy oil, will be of utmost importance in the coming decades. In the past, large-scale production from tight gas reservoirs occurred only in the U.S. and was boosted by both price incentives and well stimulation technology. A conservative study from Rogner (1997) has shown that tight gas sandstone reservoirs would represent at least over 7,000 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of natural gas in place worldwide. However, most of the studies such as the ones by the U.S. Geological Survey (U.S.G.S.) and Kuuskraa have focused on assessing the technically recoverable gas resources in the U.S. with numbers ranging between 177 Tcf and 379 Tcf. During the past few decades, gas production from tight sands field developments have taken place all around the world from South America (Argentina), Australia, Asia (China, Indonesia), the Russian Federation, Northern Europe (Germany, Norway) and the Middle East (Oman). However, the U.S. remains the region where the most extensive exploration and production for unconventional gas resources occur. In fact, unconventional gas formations accounted for 43% of natural gas production and tight gas sandstones represented 66% of the total of unconventional resources produced in the U.S. in 2006. As compared to a conventional gas well, a tight gas well will have a very low productivity index and a small drainage area. Therefore, to extract the same amount of natural gas out of the reservoir, many more wells will have to be drilled and stimulated to efficiently develop and produce these reservoirs. Thus, the risk involved is much higher than the development of conventional gas resources and the economics of developing most tight gas reservoirs borders on the margin of profitability. To develop tight gas reservoirs, engineers face complex problems because there is no typical tight gas field. In reality, a wide range of geological and reservoir differences exist for these formations. For instance, a tight gas sandstone reservoir can be shallow or deep, low or high pressure, low or high temperature, bearing continuous (blanket) or lenticular shaped bodies, being naturally fractured, single or multi-layered, and holding contaminants such as CO2 and H2S which all combined increase considerably the complexity of how to drill a well. Since the first tight gas wells were drilled in the 1940's in the U.S., a considerable amount of information has been collected and documented within the industry literature. The main objective of this research project is to develop a computer program dedicated to applying the drilling technologies and methods selection for drilling tight gas sandstone formations that have been documented as best practices in the petroleum literature.

Proper selection of drilling fluids plays a major role in determining the efficient completion of any drilling operation. With the increasing number of ultra-deep offshore wells being drilled and ever stringent environmental and safety regulations coming into effect, it becomes necessary to examine and understand the behavior of water based drilling fluids - which are cheaper and less polluting than their oil based counterpart - under extreme temperature and pressure conditions. In most of the existing literature, the testing procedure is simple - increase the temperature of the fluid in steps and record rheological properties at each step. A major drawback of this testing procedure is that it does not represent the continuous temperature change that occurs in a drilling fluid as it is circulated through the well bore. To have a better understanding of fluid behavior under such temperature variation, a continuous test procedure was devised in which the temperature of the drilling fluid was continuously increased to a pre-determined maximum value while monitoring one rheological parameter. The results of such tests may then be used to plan fluid treatment schedules. The experiments were conducted on a Chandler 7600 XHPHT viscometer and they seem to indicate specific temperature ranges above which the properties of the drilling fluid deteriorate. Different fluid compositions and drilling fluids in use in the field were tested and the results are discussed in detail.

In the aerospace industry, burr removal is a very important part of the manufacturing process. Stacks of material on sections of an aircraft are assembled and drilled by hand. Due to extensive burr formation the sheets must be destacked so that burrs can be removed and then the stacks are reassembled and fastened together. If burrs are minimized in the drilling process, this would reduce the necessity for the sheets to be destacked and deburred. One approach to minimizing burrs is to lower the thrust force in drilling through suitable modification of the drill geometry such as the use of a step drill. Although prior researchers have analyzed different drill geometries such as step drills and their effect on hole exit burr formation in the drilling process through experimentation, no work has been reported on modeling and analysis of step drilling forces and their relationship to burr formation as a function of the step drill geometry parameters. Consequently, this thesis focuses on the modeling of the thrust force and torque for step drills and analyzes their relationship with burr size as a function of the step drill geometry parameters. In the first step, a mechanistic model for thrust and torque in drilling is implemented for a standard twist drill. This mechanistic model is then adapted to predict the thrust and torque for a step drill. Subsequently, experiments are performed to validate the mechanistic model and to evaluate burr formation with standard and step drills. The influence of thrust and torque on hole exit burr formation is analyzed for different step drill geometries and experimental feeds and speeds. The results show that the predicted thrust and torque values for both drill geometries are in good agreement with measured values, although the torque model consistently underpredicts. For standard drill geometry in the calibration tests, the average error in the thrust prediction is 7.09% and the average error in the torque prediction is -18.05%. In validation tests, the average error for predicted thrust is 2.29% and the average error for predicted torque is -18.46%. For the step drill model the average error in thrust is 0.72% while the average error in torque is -8.72%. In addition, a reduction in the predicted thrust force for a step drill relative to the standard twist drill is found to correlate well with a reduction in the measured burr size. However, further reduction in the thrust force by varying the step angle and diameter ratio do not correlate well with the measured burr size. Likely reasons for these results are presented in this thesis.

This dissertation implements three-dimensional numerical simulation models to interpret formation-tester measurements acquired at arbitrary angles of wellbore deviation. Simulations include the dynamic effects of mud-filtrate invasion and multi-phase flow. Likewise, they explicitly consider the asymmetric spatial distribution of water-base and oil-base mud filtrate in the near-wellbore region due to the interplay of viscous, gravity, and capillary forces. Specific problems considered by the dissertation are: (a) estimation of permeability from formation-tester measurements (pressure and fractional flow) affected by multi-phase flow and mud-filtrate invasion, (b) quantification of the spatial zone of response of transient measurements of pressure and fractional flow rate, (c) prediction of fluid-cleanup times during sampling operations in vertical and deviated wells, (d) joint inversion of formation-tester and resistivity measurements to estimate initial water saturation and permeability of multi-layer models, and (e) estimation of saturation-dependent relative permeability and capillary pressure using selective measurement weighting and Design-of-Experiment (DoE) methods to secure a reliable initial guess for nonlinear inversion. Using realistic tool and formation configurations, field measurements validate the reliability of the proposed methods. In one example, multi-layer rock formations are modeled using electrofacies derived from nuclear magnetic resonance logs, thereby reducing the number of unknown layer permeability values from 22 to 6. In the same example, non-uniqueness in the estimation of permeability is reduced with the quantitative integration of resistivity and formation-tester measurements. A second field example undertakes the estimation of permeability by history matching both pressure and gas-oil ratio (GOR) measurements acquired with a focused-sampling probe in a 27° deviated well. Because the latter measurements are affected by partial miscibility between oil-base mud and in-situ oil, Equation-of-State (EOS) simulations are used to account for variations of fluid viscosity, fluid compressibility, fluid density, and GOR during the processes of invasion and fluid pumpout. Results indicate that gravity-segregation and capillary-pressure effects become significant with increasing angles of wellbore deviation. If not accounted for, such effects could substantially degrade the estimation of permeability. Synthetic and field examples confirm that standard formation-tester interpretation techniques based on single-phase analytical solutions lead to biased estimations of permeability, especially in deviated wells or when complete fluid cleanup is not achieved during sampling. In addition, it is found that gravity-segregated invaded formations strongly affect predictions of fluid sampling time. Reliable and accurate estimations of petrophysical properties are only possible when both the angle of wellbore deviation and the process of mud-filtrate invasion are included in the interpretation methods. / text

Since the 1980’s horizontal drilling has been a game-changing technology as it allowed the oil and gas industry to produce from reservoirs previously considered marginal or uneconomic. However, while it is considered a mature technology, directional drilling is still done in a reactive fashion. Although many directional drillers are quite adept at predicting the directional response of the bottomhole assembly (BHA) in a given well, the ability to manage all of the drilling parameters on a foot by foot basis while accurately predicting the effects of each parameter is impossible for the human brain alone. Given current rig rates, any amount of increased slide time and its reduced ROP which occurred due to poorly predicted directional response can result in a significant economic impact. There exist many measured parameters or system inputs which have been proven to affect the directional response of a drilling system. One parameter whose effect has not been investigated is mechanical specific energy or MSE. MSE is measure of how efficient the drilling process is in relation to rate of penetration. To date, MSE has primarily been used with for vibration analysis and rate of penetration optimization. The following dissertation covers research into the effect of MSE on the overall wellbore direction change or dog-leg severity. Using published experimental data, a correlation was developed which shows a clear relationship between the dog-leg severity, rate of penetration (ROP) and MSE. The correlation requires only a few hundred feet of drilling before it is able to be tuned to match an individual well’s results. With minimal tuning throughout the drilling of a well, very good results can be obtained with regards to forecasting dog-leg severity as the wellbores were drilled ahead. The correlation was tested using data from multiple, geo-steered wells drilled in a shale reservoir. The analysis of the correlation using real-world data proved it to be a robust and accurate method of predicting the magnitude of dog-leg severity. The use of this correlation results in a smoother wellbore, drilled with a faster overall ROP with a better chance of staying within the geologic targets.

Missions to Mars aim to characterize rock and subsurface soil samples and possibly bring some back to Earth for more thorough and sophisticated examination. The Martian surface is covered with basalt which has high compressive strength (andamp;gt;130 MPa), and is more difficult to drill than the much softer sedimentary formations that are presently being drilled using diamond core drills. The main objective of this thesis work is to provide the requisite groundwork towards the development of improved and sustainable drills for subsurface drilling applications on Mars, when their goals are obtaining samples. Since progressive drill-wear is substantial in sustained drilling, the experiments were designed and conducted to study the tool-wear mechanisms and understand the associated effects on drilling performance in subsurface drilling of basalt. Core drilling experiments are conducted with different drill geometries and cutting conditions in a Martian simulant, basaltic rock; monitoring thrust force, torque and measuring tool-wear for a series of successive depth-increments. Based on the experimental results an optimization model has been developed for maximizing drilling depth with minimum tool-wear. This preliminary work will help the development of smart and sustainable drills for dry drilling applications for future NASA missions to Mars.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Tulsa, 1988. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wollongong, 2005. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references: leaf 174-189.