Baker Hughes is one of the leading oil & gas service companies in the world, with a long history of technological inventions that have revolutionized the petroleum industry. It has been using Abaqus and Isight as key strategic product development tools for some time.
We recently interviewed Jeff Williams, project engineer for the wellbore construction group, about his work on downhole seal design for deep-sea wells. He presented a paper on the subject at the 2014 SIMULIA Community Conference.
SIMULIA Community News (SCN): How does the global push to develop deeper, hotter petroleum reservoirs affect your customers’ demands for ever-more robust equipment?
Williams: Currently, the price of oil doesn’t seem to make deeper exploration cost effective…but our customers know that this is a highly dynamic market. The project timelines for these deep reservoir finds is much longer than the typical well plans. They plan these projects five to 10 years out, so they want to ensure the metallurgies and technologies are feasible and in place early in the process. Additionally, as tool developers, we are held accountable for the functionality and safety of the products that go into our customers wells…so robustness is paramount. As the wells go deeper, the cost and safety risks increase dramatically.
View the Infographic: “Meet Production and Environmental Requirements”
SCN: Why is downhole seal design so critical? Describe the new feature you developed for your “zero-extrusion” seal and the surprising promise it showed.
Williams: Seals in a well construction are necessary for various reasons, but the particular seal I worked on was for a Liner Top Packer. Essentially, a typical wellbore construction consists of concentric layered tubulars…from top to bottom of the well going smaller and smaller diameters. Each tubular “layer” needs two key elements: a way to anchor to the previous “layer,” and a way to seal off from the other “layers.” For our existing “zero extrusion” seal cross section, I optimized the geometry to accommodate higher pressure differentials. On the path of optimizing, I found that split-rings placed in key locale helped boost the performance even more. Without optimization software like Isight I am not convinced we would have achieved these higher capacities. You moved from 3D to a 2D model in order to run and optimize your local Abaqus and Isight models on fewer cores in less time.
SCN: Talk about how you combined a DOE loop with an optimization loop to give you a trustworthy final output from your 2D iterations.
Williams: When doing either optimization or DOE algorithms separately, there is always a risk of coming to a potential false “dead end” solution, or falling into a valley of the 3D solution subspace. In order to miss the false solutions, combining the two is a recommended practice.
SCN: Would an experienced designer have been able to come to the same conclusion?
Williams: I wouldn’t think so…it didn’t come intuitively to me either. I remember making a note of this potential problem in a SIMULIA Isight training…and have been applying this technique ever since.
“Anytime you can minimize and/or improve the impact on the supply chain of a product, the better off you will be with new product introduction.”
– Jeff Williams, Project Engineer, Baker Hughes
SCN: Your 2014 SCC paper reported results that were “astonishing.” How did Isight help you push the boundaries of what could be achieved in seal design and define a new threshold in performance?
Williams: This is a perfect example of being stuck in a paradigm. You are taught certain rules and inherit designs that have been through years of empirical testing. My role with the company has been to try and ignore the noise and begin my own unbiased evaluation of existing products…see how they work with FEA and then see how I can improve them. Baker Hughes has always been on the cutting edge of new seal design, and that will continue. What I set out to do was see how our existing portfolio could be improved with simple changes. That is the astonishing part…I made simple changes to our existing portfolio geometry with potentially groundbreaking results.
SCN: How will such a “simple” seal optimization exercise change your business?
Williams: Anytime you can minimize and/or improve the impact on the supply chain of a product, the better off you will be with new product introduction. Optimizing existing seal packages and methodologies within our company allows us to minimize the impact on the supply chain while still meeting our customers’ more aggressive goals.
SCN: What other areas will Abaqus and Isight help you explore in the future?
Williams: Let’s just say there are even more exciting things coming for our Liner Hanger product line this year, where Ultra-HPHT could be considered fringe technology…we will be rolling out a new mainstream HPHT seal design we are all thrilled about. I hope to tell everyone the development story at next year’s SIMULIA Community Conference.
Read Jeff’s full paper from the 2014 SIMULIA Community Conference: “Jumping the Iteration Train: Using Isight to Advance Downhole Seal Design”
