A Blowout Preventer (BOP) serves as a safety valve in the drilling process in oil and gas industry.  It will be closed if an influx of formation fluids occurs. This event, commonly referred to as a kick, threatens the rig.  A Ram BOP is one type of widely used BOP.  It is composed of two ram blades which will move towards each other to shear the drilling pipe and to close the valve.  Although the structure is known, the pipe shearing process is invisible since it is covered by the ‘Black Box’ – BOP body.  To ensure the shearing process can be completed in the rig, multiple lab tests will be run to check the BOP’s capability and the required shearing pressure for the given drill pipes.  The paper presents a new automation CAE toolkit method recently developed to simulate Ram BOP pipe shearing process.  The toolkit automatically predicts the required shear pressure and provides designer with the 3D visualization of the shearing process. 

The toolkit method is developed based on finite element analysis (FEA) method and the pipe shearing failure is modeled by element deletion approach.  It automates the complete modeling and simulation procedure, from model setup to result generation.  For a given Ram shearing case, the toolkit begins with importing the BOP design, and then it will generate the pipe geometry, assign material properties, create mesh, define boundary conditions, run simulation and retrieve the simulation result.  To make it user friendly, the toolkit is integrated with a computer-aided engineering (CAE) software, and a graphic user interface (GUI) is built by Python code.    

The toolkit method is validated by a case study of a Ram BOP pipe shearing lab test.  The predicted shear pressure is in good agreement with the test data.  In addition, the results also include the sheared pipe shape and the Ram blade deformation, both of which match the test observations.

The toolkit’s GUI is easily used by design engineers.  It requires simple and generic information on Ram design, application scenario and material properties.  An engineer without CAE or FEA background can easily take it in short time.  The toolkit method also makes the modeling process faster.  A Ram shearing model usually require many hours’ effort.  With the toolkit, a Ram shearing model can be set up in several minutes.  In addition, the toolkit also provides the design engineer with the flexibility of different pipe position and boundary constraints.  This helps designers optimize the BOP design by comparing its performance under real and complex well scenarios. 

The toolkit method automates and integrates the process from computer aided design (CAD) to computer aided simulation for Ram shearing process.  It significantly simplifies the modeling work and facilitates the design optimization process, in that: 1) It does not require CAE/FEA domain knowledge and makes the modeling and simulation work available to designers; 2) It reduces the modeling time from many hours to several minutes.  The toolkit method will change the habit and make life easy for the designers.


Automation CAE Toolkit Method for Ram BOP Design

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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