Design of cone-launcher system for SET applications in well drilling

Due to the continued forecast of increasing energy demand, oil in particular, it is expected that oil companies will intensify their efforts in meeting the global demand. Drilling deep and accessing difficult reservoirs are already posing serious challenges to local, regional and international players in this business. A part from this, there is a continuous push on performance improvement, cost reduction and innovating new techniques/tools/procedures to push toward realizing the dream of having mono-bore diameter well. Solid Expandable Tubular (SET) Technology has already made significant inroads in resolving these challenges. Various operators around the world are already using the technology towards zonal isolation, repairing ageing wells to have profitable production, etc. Numerous experimental, numerical and analytical works have been reported in literature related to solid expandable tubular. The recently designed and commissioned expandable tubular test-rig in Sultan Qaboos University - Oman - has helped local operators to use the technology with confidence as well as to search for low cost expandable solutions. Still many issues are either not understood at all or have very little understanding about it. These include post expansion mechanical characterization, lowering the cost of expandable tubular, simplify the expansion operation and cost either through the design of optimal tools or reducing the number of steps needed in an expansion process. The students at Sultan Qaboos University were actively involved in many expansion related works in Engineering Research Laboratory. However, the students have never made an attempet to complete the question of having own indigenously design cone and launcher system. The task of designing a new cone and launcher system which can be effectively and efficiently used in down-hole applications was initiated last year. In Oman, there is no such in-house developed design to deliver this work. It will be nice to have one's own design, which with time can be improved. In view of this, the objective of this work was set to design a Cone and Launcher System for SET applications. A design was proposed to expand the tubular in a stroke of 2-ft length. Multiple strokes can be done in one cycle of operation. 75/8'' tubular system was selected for this specific task. The design work was done from component to sub-system to product level either analytically or numerically using finite element method. The constraints of cost and ease of manufacturing locally were prime concern during the design work. The working of proposed system has been simulated in SolidWorks software to demonstrate its operation.