Efficient and high-fidelity steering ability prediction of a slender drilling assembly

In drilling engineering, it is extremely challenging to drill a prescribed wellbore over several thousand meters. One of the main difficulties arises from accurately predicting and controlling the directional drilling performance, caused by the complex nonlinear dynamics of the slender drilling assembly and its interactions with the surrounding rocks. Nowadays, the simplified analytical geometry method, which has been adopted as the industry standard, can merely offer a rough estimation of the drilling direction, while the high-accuracy finite element method is computationally inefficient. This study is intended to provide a straightforward prediction of the drilling direction for a long drilling distance accurately and efficiently by proposing a dynamical simulation method based on the flexible multibody approach. Three techniques were adopted to achieve the critical objective of the paper. First, an Arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian formulation was used to provide a new approach to balance the efficiency and accuracy. Additionally, it can perfectly simulate the realistic drilling operation that drill pipes are continuously added to the drill string one by one through dynamically inserting new beam elements into the existing model. Second, the whole drill string and its interaction with the wellbore were all considered to carry out a high-fidelity simulation. Finally, the bit–rock interaction model was introduced to offer a straightforward way of evaluating the steerability of drilling assemblies. The presented method and model were validated by the consistency between the simulated wellbore trajectory and the in-field experimental data and are ready to be applied in drilling tools design, real-time drilling simulation, and drilling direction control.