Attitude control system for directional drilling bottom hole assemblies

Abstract

A general approach for the attitude control of directional drilling tools for the oil and gas industry is proposed. The attitude is represented by a unit vector, thus the non-linearities introduced by Euler angle representations are avoided. Three control laws are proposed, and their stability is proven. Their behaviour is tested by numerical simulation. The merits of the laws from an engineering perspective are highlighted, and some details for the implementation of the laws on directional drilling tools are provided.

Structured uncertainty analysis of pole placement and H∞ controllers for directional drilling attitude tracking

“…12 with the first order response evident). This implies that with a high gain setting, the pole placement and H ∞ controllers reduce to being identical in actuation and response to the discrete attitude controller detailed in Panchal et al (2012). The behavior of the discrete, high-gain pole placement and H ∞ controllers is such that state response stays in a stable limit cycle when on target, as shown in Figs.…”

Vector Based Kinematic Closed-Loop Attitude Control-System for Directional Drilling

“…In this section an attitude control law from (Panchal et al, 2012) is stated and its stability is proved by Lyapunov direct method using a lemma that is derived directly from the Lyapunov Theorem of Local Stability (Slotine and Li, 1991). The following definition (Slotine and Li, 1991) is first required.…”

“…In this paper a feedback control law for stabilizing the attitude of a general directional steering drilling system is outlined. Although the controller was originally proposed in Panchal et al (2012), here we demonstrate by simulation the performance of the proposed controller for following paths, in particular paths generated using an optimal geometric Hermite curve technique (Panchal et al, 2011). Section 2 details the model used to represent the transient behavior of the tools attitude based on an angle axis representation.…”

Experimental study on jet pulse assembly design and numerical simulation

“…Since the successful development of the tool around 2000, it has been widely used in thousands of wells around the world. However, both AOT and LOT have slowed down the optimization and further application of these tools, which have complex structures such as deformable or movable parts and subsequent maintenance, technical difficulties associated with corrosion, wear and failure (Panchal et al 2012).…”