Vaibhav Marfatia is a Team Lead at SLB (Schlumberger) with 5+ years of experience. He specializes in implementing digital technologies for engineering downhole tools used in well completions. He is dedicated to enhancing the design efficiency, expedite product delivery, and elevate product performance. Vaibhav holds a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering and a Master's degree in Design Engineering.
Talk title: Enhancing the design efficiency of downhole tools used in energy services with surrogate models and optimization
In well completions, a collet is a mechanical device used in various downhole tools which exhibits a behavior: their fingers deflect under specific axial forces and allow tool to lock-unlock from a profile at specific positions to perform various operations. Analyzing the intricate relationship between force, deflection, and stress in collets is paramount to tool design. Analytical calculators often fall short of accuracy, necessitating time-consuming finite element analysis (FEA) followed by physical test. The traditional manual design approach requires several iterations to design a collet with given design constraint and it may not provide the best possible solution.
This work introduces an efficient approach to design a collet through Response Surface Modeling (RSM) and optimization techniques. RSM is developed for a single ended collet design which is a mathematical approximation of a collet behavior. It is generated by analyzing the output data from FEA, using statistical methods and machine learning. RSM for a collet significantly reduces the computational time and costs. The developed RSM model demonstrates remarkable accuracy, with a mean error of under 2% compared to FEA results (~150 validation data), and it predicts the collet's physical behavior in a matter of seconds (~0.03 sec, 20,000 times faster than FEA).
The optimization workflow is developed based on RSM using modeFRONTIER software to minimize the length (hence cost) of the collet and stresses generated with given geometrical space constraints. The workflow is a generic tool that can adapt various sizes and materials. The workflow provides a semi-automatic solution to design a collet which will significantly reduce the development time by eliminating manual iterations and performing FEA.