Study on a Mechanical Semi-Active Heave Compensation System of Drill String for Use on Floating Drilling Platform

RESEARCH ARTICLE Study on a Mechanical Semi-Active Heave Compensation System of Drill String for Use on Floating Drilling Platform Qingyou Liu1,2,3, Yang Tang1,2*, Chongjun Huang4, Chong Xie1 1 School of Mechatronic Engineering, Southwest Petroleum University, Chengdu, China, 2 State Key Laboratory of Oil and Gas Reservoir Geology and Exploitation, Southwest Petroleum University, Chengdu, China, 3 Xi Hua University, Chengdu, China, 4 Drilling & Production Engineering Technology Research Institute, Chuanqing Drilling Engineering Company Limited, CNPC, Guanghan, China * Abstract OPEN ACCESS Citation: Liu Q, Tang Y, Huang C, Xie C (2015) Study on a Mechanical Semi-Active Heave Compensation System of Drill String for Use on Floating Drilling Platform. PLoS ONE 10(7): e0133026. doi:10.1371/ journal.pone.0133026 Editor: Xiaosong Hu, University of California Berkeley, UNITED STATES Received: February 9, 2015 Accepted: June 22, 2015 Published: July 17, 2015 Copyright: © 2015 Liu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Funding: The work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 51274171), the Graduate Student Innovation Fund of School of Mechatronic Engineering. Southwest Petroleum University (CX2014BZ04), and the Graduate Innovation Foundation of Southwest Petroleum University, SGIFSWPU. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. There are some disadvantages for existing heave compensation systems of drill string used for the Floating Drilling Platform (FDP), including high energy consumption, large and complex structure, and expensive manufacturing and maintenance costs. In view of the above, we present a streamlined mechanical semi-active heave compensation system (MSAHC) in this study. This system consists of active compensation part with the pinion and rack and passive compensation part. In order to evaluate system performance of the MSAHC, we establish its simulation model with AMEsim software. In the process of simulation, displacement of rotary hook and energy consumption is regarded as performance parameters of the system. And the change rule of two performance parameters are analyzed by changing these design parameters including gear radius of the pinion and rack, scale coefficient of PID, rotary hook load, heave height and heave period of the FDP, and accumulator volume. Then, based on the simulation results of the MSAHC system performance, we have selected out a best set of design parameters from them. Moreover, the feasibility of the design scheme of the MSAHC is effectively verified by comparison with the existing three heave compensation system. The result shows that the energy consumption of the MSAHC is lower than the active heave compensation system (AHC) and the semiactive heave compensation system (SAHC) when achieving a same compensation effect as well as the accumulator volume of MSAHC is half of the passive heave compensation system (PHC). Therefore, the new designed MSAHC not only ensure compensation effect but also lower energy consumption, and its structure is simplified by adopting the simple mechanical structure to decrease manufacturing cost, maintenance cost and floor space. Introduction To meet the increasing market demand of industrial production and daily life, such as transportation sector and manufacturing industry, the development of oil and gas has turned from PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0133026 July 17, 2015 1 / 19 Mechanical Semi-Active Heave Compensation System the shallow seas to the deepwater gradually [1–3]. In the exploration and development of deepwater oil and gas, the FDP will come up heave, roll, pitch and yaw influenced by the wind, wave and ocean current [4]. The heave motion of the FDP can bring about the drill string in the process of drilling to perform a reciprocating move up and down. That will lead to drilling weight change on drill bit and even make the drill bit break away from bottom hole. And then drilling efficiency is reduced, service life of the drill string and the drill bit is decreased, and even drilling safety problems may be given rise [5] [6]. Therefore, it is necessary to add some appropriate compensation measures to eliminate the reciprocating heave movement of drill string in the offshore drilling process. By investigation found that the heave compensation system of drill string on the FDP is one common way to solve the problem above at present [7] [8]. The existing heave compensation systems used on the FDP mainly have three different concepts, namely passive heave compensation; active heave compensation and semi-active heave compensation [9]. Over the years, a lot of research works on three heave compensation systems have been done, through a variety of measures including scheme design, theoretical analysis, simulation and optimization, etc. Recent research on PHC systems include the work by Driscoll et al.[10] who found stiffness and damping characteristics of a passive cage-mounted heave compensator, and by Jia et al. [11] [12] who proposed a PHC system with accumulators and carried out a simulation and modeling research. Another work on AHC is that Hao and Liu et al. [13] who presented a kind of AHC system design scheme which the control object was variable pump and electro-hydraulic proportional directional valve, and Xu et al. [14] proposed a principle and mathematical modeling of a new AHC system. Moreover, a new SHAC system has been developed lately by Zhang et al. [15] and model and simulation of the system were also done to ensure necessary design performance. In order to solve the conflict between compensation effect and power consumption of heave compensation system, a new type of drill string heave compensation system is designed by H. Jiang et al. [16]. However, the previous research for the heave compensation systems had failed to consider these problems associated with high energy consumption, large and complex structure, expensive manufacturing and maintenance cost and big floor space and so on. In order to achieve energy conservation, cost reduction and environment protection, it is necessary to carry out an improvement and optimization for the heave compensation system to make up for the above deficiencies. Therefore, we designed a new heave compensation system of drill string—— MSAHC in this paper. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section Establishment of Design Scheme, the active compensation part of the system was designed by combining the advantages of mechanical structure, and passive compensation part was improved based on the existing SAHC system. The Establishment of Simulat (...truncated)