Analysis of effects of operating parameters on rate of penetration in drilling process with air down-the-hole hammer

Air down-the-hole(DTH)hammer drilling has long been recognized to have the potential of drilling faster than conventional rotary drill,especially in some hard rocks such as granite,sandstone,limestone,dolomite,etc.with the same weight on bit(WOB)and rotations per minute(RPM).So,it has been widely used in many drilling fields including mineral resource exploration drilling,oil and gas drilling and geothermal drilling.In order to reduce drilling cost by selecting optimal drilling parameters,rate of penetration(ROP)should be estimated accurately and the effects of different factors on ROP should be analyzed.In this research,ANN model with several multi-layer perception back propagation(BP)networks for predicting ROP of air DTH hammer drilling was developed using controllable parameters such as impact energy,impact frequency,WOB,RPM and bit operating time for the formations with a certain drillability index of rock.Several BP neural networks with the different neurons in hidden layers were developed and compared for selecting optimal architecture of ANN.The effects of the drilling parameters such as impact energy,impacting frequency,WOB,RPM and bit operating time on the ROP of air DTH hammer drilling were investigated by trained ANN.From the analyses,the optimum range of drilling parameters for providing high ROP were determined and analyzed for a formation with a certain drillability index of rock.The methodology proposed in this study can be used in many mathematical problems for optimization of drilling process with air DTH hammer.

Reliability analysis of retractable drill bit with air reverse circulation used for drilling while casing

Casing-while-drilling(CWD)with down the hole(DTH)hammer drilling technology has been widely used in unconsolidated formations,due to its advantages in protecting the borehole wall,excellent rock cuttings capacity,and fast penetration rate in hard rock.As an important component of the CWD system,the structure of the retractable drill bit needs not only to ensure to form stronger reverse circulation,but also to be expandable or retractable as needed,otherwise the drill bit cannot be lift and put down smoothly in the casing,and may lead to drilling accidents.This paper developed a new type of reverse circulation DTH hammer drill bit used for CWD drilling technology.The retractable performance of this type of drill bit is studied using ADAMS software.The results show that it is smoothly expandable and retractable as designed under the conditions of the weight of the bit(WOB)of 0.5–2.0 t and the rotation speed of 30–60 r/min.To investigate the reverse circulation effect of the drill bit,Fluent software was used to simulate the flow characteristic inside it.The simulation results indicated that it can form strong reverse circulation,and the entrainment ratio h can reach 9.5%.