Tag Archives: hydraulics

The Whole Package in a Small Package

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The phrase “The Whole Package” is defined as:

  1. All the elements constituting a whole or occurring as a unit.
  2. Something or someone that possesses a full set of relevant characteristics.

This expression is often used to describe something that is of good choice; something that has everything that one needs for a specific matter or something that possesses all that one is searching for.

With all the advancements technology has achieved, it is marvelous how it keeps evolving in ways that are far beyond describable. Now you can have computer programs that can do multitasks; for instance, a software that possesses a full set of relevant characteristics for a specific need. It is literally getting the whole package in a small package.

The Whole Package in a Small Package

Let’s talk about one good example of this.

DEPRO, a software developed by PVI, is a complete torque, drag and hydraulics program that combines all the essential components of our TADPRO and HYDPRO software.

For torque and drag, this software eliminates and diminishes a lot of the risks in drilling, completion or any particular tool operations. It also performs comprehensive hydraulics calculations so that the downhole drilling hydraulic conditions can be examined, and potential problems can be identified in advance before field execution.

Among its many features DEPRO also includes:

  • Soft and stiff string models
  • Buckling criteria
  • Drilling, back reaming, rotating and tripping operations
  • Minimum WOB to buckle
  • Stress calculations
  • 2D/3D animations
  • Liner cementing job
  • Field data comparisons on torque, drag, ECD and SPP
  • Fixed flow rate analysis
  • Surge and swab
  • Hydraulics sensitivity analysis
DEPRO - Torque, Drag and Hydraulics

This is a good package for service companies and operators in which they can find everything that they need for their jobs to be done all in one place. In other words they can have the whole package in a small package.

I Never Felt So Good When Taking Off My Shoes

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During Thanksgiving weekend, our company staff and families went to Lake Tahoe to have a retreat. Skiing was one of the activities. Quite a few of us were first time skiers. Here are some of our children expressing their experience on wearing the ski boots.

Rachel: "I felt short when taking off the shoes."

Nathan: "I never felt so good when taking off my shoes."

Nowadays, almost all our activities are enriched with high-tech equipment. Skiing is no exception. A pair of ski boots can easily weight a few pounds. Walking with them is no fun. But once the shoes are attached to ski and ski is on the slope of snow, they make us run faster on snow than on road. Technology makes wonders. Besides specific skills and physical training, more sportsmen rely heavily on gears to enhance their performance. To swimmers, it is swimming suit; to tennis players, it is racket and strings and also as the running shoes to runners. The pairs can go on.

These enabling technologies also play big role in our drilling industry, making drilling operations more cost effective and safe. Among them is drilling engineering software. Even though the drilling software does not weight as much as ski boots, it carries the significant results of research and engineering in the areas of pipe mechanics, hydraulics, casing wear, etc.

One might think the drilling software as one more package to install in computer, one more burden to carry. However, the benefits of running drilling software far out weight the cost or trouble of using it.

Download and installation of our MUDPRO (mud reporting software) may take 15 minutes. Once mud engineers start to use MUDPRO, they could easily save hours of work every day, not to mention the much better quality of report and end-of-well recap.

Sometimes, a little bit trouble, such as wearing heavy ski boots, brings tremendous convenience; sometimes, a little bit spending is rewarded with big saving.

Just as Nathan described his feeling on ski boots, our MUDPRO user might say: "I never felt so relieved when making daily mud report."

Drilling Hydraulics Software Training in Bolivia

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As part of the software sale to a service company in Bolivia, software training was conducted in Santa Cruz of Bolivia, the 2nd largest city in the country.

Being south of equator, it is summer in Bolivia. Hot and humid, the weather is similar to Houston’s a few months ago. I immediately got used to it, until I was woken up by big noise of birds this morning. You know what? They are parrots singing in the giant tree in front of my room. That was a pleasant surprise. Those birds would be very nice pets in Houston. Although I don’t speak their language, I knew they were very happy.

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Our training was on drilling hydraulics (HYDPRO). We had a dozen of students ranging from seasoned mud engineers to newly graduates. The biggest challenge I faced was the communication: they speak more English than I do Spanish. None was sufficient to understand each other. We had a couple of engineers, educated in US, interpreting for everyone.

The teaching went smoother when I started to demo HYDPRO. HYDPRO does have an option to switch to Spanish, which means all captions including those in reports could be in Spanish. But even without using the local language, our students had fairly grip in understanding the program structure and logic flow.

I think their knowledge of drilling fluid, mud engineering and hydraulics helps them tremendously. And I also think we did a good job in interface design so that it breaks language barriers for our users whose native language is not English.

After all, drilling operations are similar across the world. We speak different languages, but we use API standard drill pipe, casing, and handful rheological models to describe fluid behavior. Our drilling software is a tool beyond boundaries, which can be used by drilling engineers in North America, South America, and any other continents.

One student in the training showed me a programmable scientific calculator, using which he had coded a remarkably drilling hydraulics program. Here is the picture of his “Hidraulica de perforacion”.

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This is the picture of our HYDPRO training.

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My first trip to Bolivia was fruitful. I am sure I will come back for business or vacation: my visa is valid for 5 years with the onetime fee of $125!

Paper and E-reader vs. Book and HYDPRO

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“Paper: The original wireless communication”. This is a sentence in Sappi Fine Paper North America’s eQ Journal 004. So interestingly stated, it tells a lot about human being’s communication need in the age of a digitalized world. “The World Wide Web, far from decreasing paper consumption, served to increase the amount of printing done at home and in the office.” Abigail J. Sellen and Richard H. R. Harper wrote in “The Myth of the Paperless Office”. After people began to use e-mail in the 1990s, paper consumption is estimated to have increased by some 40%. Neither is eBook device nor screen likely to make print on paper obsolete.

For my own reading pleasure, I use these 2 devices whenever I travel.

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The convenience of carrying hundreds of books in one device allows me to switch between the books with a great flexibility, although I still enjoy reading paper books in my backyard. The tactile sensation of fingers turning fine-grain papers and the smell of ink and paper are also parts of reading experience. Developed 2000 years apart, paper and digital technologies not only co-exist, but also enhance the synergy between them as paper is routinely converted to digital documents and digital documents to paper.

We also see this 2-way conversion in the engineering efforts of drilling software developments. In 2012, Prof. Boyun Guo from University of Louisiana at Lafayette and I jointly wrote a book about drilling hydraulics (Applied Drilling Circulation Systems).

This book covers many areas of hydraulics concerns of drilling and mud engineers, with theories, examples, and operation guidelines: a good source of information and knowledge for petroleum engineering students and engineers.

Quite a few years ago, PVI developed its popular drilling hydraulics software HYDPRO which addresses majority of drilling hydraulics including frictional pressure drop, ECD, bit optimization and hole cleaning etc.

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Similar technologies, delivered in traditional paper and the state-of-the-art application, serve drilling engineers’ essential need to understand and optimize drilling hydraulics. Equations in the book are the DNA of the HYDPRO, while the software is the screen play of the book.

Drilling software like HYDPRO is a great vehicle to carry the heavy loads of technologies. Yet, it provides engineers with easy-to learn and simple-to-use experience.