The unconventional down-hole resources such as shale oil and gas have gradually become a critical form of energy supply thanks to the recent petroleum technology advancement. Its economically viable and reliable production highly depends on the proper operation and control of the down-hole drilling system. The trend of deeper drilling in a complex environment requires a more effective and reliable control optimization scheme, either for predrilling planning or for online optimal control. Given the nonlinear nature of the drilling system, such an optimal control is not trivial. In this paper, we present a method based on dynamic programming (DP) that can lead to a computationally efficient drilling control optimization. A drilling dynamics model that can enable this method is first constructed, and the DP algorithm is customized so that much improved computational efficiency can be achieved compared with using standard DP. A higher-order dynamics model is then used to validate the effectiveness of the optimized control, and the control robustness is also evaluated by adding perturbations to the model. The results verify that the proposed approach is effective and efficient to solve the down-hole drilling control optimization problem.

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This paper proposed an equivalent input disturbance (EID)-based approach to control the vertical down-hole drilling process. To describe a drill string which is typically long with large axial-to-radius ratio, a neutral-type model is used to accurately capture dynamics of this type of slender string structure. The axial-torsional coupling effect due to drill bit/rock interaction is also included in the model. A new controller is then designed based on the coupled neutral model, and the coupling effect is specifically addressed in the design. To address the uncertainty of the bit/rock interaction, the EID method is used. A new Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional is proposed for the control design. To this end, a series of numerical simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.

This paper proposes a novel computationally efficient dynamics modeling approach for down-hole well drilling system. The existing drilling modeling methods are either computationally intensive such as those using finite element method (FEM) or weak in fidelity for complex geometry such as those using transfer matrix method (TMM). To take advantage of the benefits of FEM and TMM and avoid their drawbacks, this paper presents a new hybrid method integrating both of the aforementioned modeling approaches, enabled by the unique structural geometry of the drilling system. The new method is then applied to the down-hole well drilling system modeling, incorporating the dynamics of top drive, drill-string, bottom-hole-assembly (BHA), and bit–rock interaction. The hybrid integration approaches for both the axial and torsional dimensions are explicitly derived, and we also give directions on how to resolve those for flexural dimension. To this end, numerical simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid modeling approach.