Muscat: An engineering design project by final year Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering students at Sultan Qaboos University (SQU), that could lead to cost reduction, efficiency increase and performance improvement in oil well drilling technology, has won the best student paper award in the recently concluded Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) local and regional contests.
Dr. Tasneem Pervez, Associate Professor & Project Leader of Applied Mechanics and Advanced Materials Research Group in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at SQU, said that although five students have worked on the project, the project leader Omar Al Abri was selected to present the project in local and regional competitions.
Now after winning the regional competition, the group is focusing to compete and win the SPE International competition to be held in Italy in September 2010, according to a SQU press release.
The design of an optimal cone and launcher system is expected to make rapid strides in lowering the operation cost and simplifying the expansion operation in Solid Expandable Tubular (SET) rigs used in oil recovery operations.
The recently designed and commissioned expandable tubular test-rig in Sultan Qaboos University has helped local operators to use the technology with confidence as well as to search for low cost expandable solutions. Still many issues are not understood at all.
These include post expansion mechanical characterization, lowering the cost of expandable tubular, simplifying the expansion operation and cost either through the design of optimal cone or reducing the number of steps needed in expansion process.
The objective of the student project was set to design a Cone and Launcher System for SET applications. A new design was proposed to expand the tubular in a stroke of 2 ft length. Multiple strokes can be done in one cycle of operation. A 8-inch pass through system is selected for this specific task.
The design work was done from component to sub-system to product level. Either analytical or finite element method was used for designing. The researchers and students said the constraints of accuracy, cost, ease of manufacturing locally and ease of operation using existing drill rig facility was prime concern during design work. The working of proposed system has been simulated in Solid-Work software to demonstrate its operation.
The proposed design of cone and launcher system has three units, namely; a) an expansion unit, b) a power unit, c) an anchor unit.
All of these were designed by the final year students of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering programs.
