Simulation of solid tubular expansion in well drilling using finite element method

Solid expandable tubular is an emerging and promising technology in petroleum industry. It consists of increasing the diameter of a tubular by hydraulically pushing or mechanically pulling a conical mandrel through it. In this paper, a dynamic explicit finite element analysis (FEA) has been used to study the solid tubular expansion using ABAQUS, a commercial FEA software package. The required drawing force for tubular expansion was estimated for different mandrel shapes, friction coefficients, and expansion ratios. The drawing force increases with the increase in friction coefficient and expansion ratio. It was also found that the material velocities increase on the front of the mandrel but decrease to zero in the post expansion section. Moreover, the plastic deformation shows a reduction of thickness with friction coefficient and expansion ratio. Simulation results also revealed that contact occurs at the two ends of the conical mandrel tubular interface and that the contact stress increases with friction coefficient reaches to maximum value at an expansion ratio of 20%.