Oil well production should be able to reach a specified rate during its life although it´s usual some issues to force down the oil recover rate. Production engineer team works incessantly seeking different ways to make stable and in a high performance the oil well production. However, some interventions are constantly required due to a loss production caused by an equipment miss functioning occurrence or because an operational mistake.

For a long time workover’s new technologies has being researched and developed, as well as the robotics system usage in oil and gas industry grew up in last 5 or 10 years. As a consequence of the technological advances, the risk surrounding workover procedures decreases significantly same as the quantity of machinery and operators needed in each intervention.

Therefore, a conceptual development for a displacement system has proposed. This equipment should be strong enough to resist against oil well environment characteristics, since nowadays challenge involved high pressure and high temperature wells, high flow rate and others very hostile features. Even though, this device have to be very lightweight because it´ll be responsible for carry on others systems (measurement / inspection tools, completation tools, etc.) displacing into the oil well production column. On the other hand, it needs to be high efficient power consumption since the power availability used to be limited in autonomous solution.

In order to guarantee the achievement of the desirable requirements the design team followed a robust method of product development process named as consensual model. This theory is a convergence of many authors’ ideas at the similar point where it proposes a sequence of phases organized to deliver specifics results in a specific order, these phases are Informational, Conceptual, Preliminary, Detailed and Prototyping. Due to those deliverables, the design team could achieve the proposal of this conceptual device.

First, the development process stared with a huge state of the art review, where were studied documents like papers, patents, oil well procedures and other stuff. While preforming this activity they also did the lifecycle assessment followed by the gathering of client’s needs and definition / prioritization of requirements. This phase ware the informational phase.

The next step were to start the conceptual phase. This part of the process started with the global function and the functional synthesis definition. Then was the processes of creation and selection of possible concepts, aided by a morphological matrix. After that, the design team performed some evaluations with the better concepts to identify the best one to achieve all requirements.

The chosen concept is a cylindrical device compounded by two stages of traction with three wheels each one. The propulsion works like a screw motion made by the rotation of the two tractions part. There are motors to active and deactivate the displacement and there are motors to perform the adjustment with the diameter of the column. This mechanism works like pantograph expanding and retracting in order to overcome obstacles and to keep the contact between wheels and inside column wall.

Additionally the theoretical analyses of the traction capability for the proposed system apparently indicates it´s able to handle at least five times its own weight with a low power consumption while displacing. The handling of electronics hardware and equipment ware in the calculus of the amount power required although its power consumption and efficiency were out of the analyses. In fact, the assessment only considered the mechanical power.

Finally, the team could identify that designed concept, which has higher likelihood to resist the hostile environment, support robotics system to perform workover activities, being able to overcome obstacles there are in the production column. In conclusion, to define the best proposed solution of a displacement system capable to work into the oil well delivering all requirements needed.


Conceptual Design of an In-Pipe Displacement System Applicable for Oil Well Production Column

Division / Sponsors: 
Aerospace, Bioengineering, Applied Mechanics, Design Engineering Division, Advanced Energy Systems, Manufacturing Engineering Division, Noise Control and Acoustics, Nondestructive Evaluation, Diagnosis, and Prognosis (NDPD), Nuclear Engineering Division, Process Industries Division, Fluids Engineering, Heat Transfer, Materials, Microelectromechanical Systems, Safety Engineering and Risk Analysis, Computers & Information in Engineering


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2020/volume/84478

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