BHA Critical Connection PHM Model for Drilling Industry

Properly processing and extracting key information from drilling data provides opportunities to enhance equipment maintenance and prevent costly accidents in the field. The ability to estimate the remaining useful life (RUL) of components affords the opportunity to plan and optimize the lifecycle and retire equipment prior to breakdown. This paper is dedicated to presenting a new component-level bottom hole assembly (BHA) critical connection prognostics and health management (PHM) model, designed to assist in preventing costly downhole failures due to connector damage. Additionally, the model enables the decision-making process regarding additional drilling runs before the connectors must be retired or removed for maintenance. The significant advantage of applying the critical connection PHM model is that it only utilizes existing drilling measurements and does not necessitate any specialized downhole measurement equipment or additional gauges. The workflow of the PHM model integrates a high-fidelity physical model of the connectors and a specially designed, high-accuracy finite-element solver for computation of the necessary parameters during drilling or as part of post-job maintenance procedures. The newly developed model has been successfully validated based on legacy data and is currently undergoing field testing to assess potential limitations and constraints.