Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering 175 (2019) 536–546

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Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering

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A dynamic mesh-based approach to analyse hydrodynamic interactions T

between a fluidic hammer and drill bit
Dongyu Wua,b, Shaohe Zhanga,b, Yong Hea,b,∗
a
Key Laboratory of Metallogenic Prediction of Nonferrous Metals and Geological Environment Monitoring (Central South University), Ministry of Education, PR China
b
School of Geosciences and Info-Physics, Central South University, Changsha, 410083, PR China

A R T I C LE I N FO A B S T R A C T

Keywords: The main goal of this study was to reveal the hydrodynamic interactions between a fluidic hammer and drill bit.
Dynamic mesh technique For this purpose, a computational fluid dynamics analysis based on a dynamic mesh technique was used instead
Fluidic hammer of the conventional steady analysis. The results show that the effect of the drill bit on the performance of the
Bit hydraulics fluidic hammer is negligible. However, the fluidic hammer has a significant effect on the bit hydraulics. The flow
Flow fluctuation
fluctuation caused by the fluidic hammer can significantly influence the bottom-hole flow fields and upwards
Fluid-structure interactions
flow velocity in annular space. It is also found that the flow fluctuation ratio is nearly constant during the
variation of total inlet flow rate, while it can be largely affected by the mass of the steel mass block, piston
diameter, and piston rod diameter. To improve the borehole cleaning, the lowest average velocity in the annular
space during flow fluctuation should be higher than the critical velocity or the corresponding velocity associated
with the desired cutting concentration. The conclusions can also serve as a reference for the study of other
hydraulic hammers or vibrators.

1. Introduction However, the usage of a hydraulic hammer, including the fluidic

A fluidic hammer is one kind of hydraulic hammer characterized by
converting fluid pressure energy into high-frequency percussion for
well drilling (Zhang et al., 2019; Peng et al., 2018; Jian and Shang,
2005; Santos et al., 2000; Parra et al., 2014). It has been widely used
since its invention in the 1970s, and has played an important role in
drilling the No. 1 hole of the Project of China Continental Scientific
Drilling (CCSD) (Peng et al., 2013). Utilizing high-frequency axial im-
pacting force, this percussion tool is highly recommended for oil and
gas drilling to maintain the verticality of the well and drill at a com-
petitive rate of penetration (ROP) (Peng et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2019;
Gerlero et al., 2014; Powell et al., 2013).
Besides, the fluidic hammer can be modified as a vibratory tool for
reducing friction and torque in the horizontal direction drilling (He
et al., 2015; Zhang et al., 2018). Numerous studies on the vibratory
tools for extending the coiled tube (CT) reach has been reported in the
last two decades (Sola and Lund, 2000; Robertson et al., 2004; Kolle
et al., 2016; Livescu et al., 2017). The advantages and disadvantages of
the present friction-reducing tools have been well summarized in the
work of Livescu and Craig, 2017, 2018. Considering the similar way
how they work, the fluidic hammer has the great potential to be used
for CT to reduce sliding friction.
hammer, has been limited by the drastic abrasion of particles in drilling
fluids (Carlos et al., 2003). High-concentration particles (cuttings) in
drilling fluids tend to present strong abrasive property. It may cause
seal failure or erosion phenomenon at the core component of a hy-
draulic hammer, which will inevitably short the life of a hydraulic
hammer. For instance, a severe erosion of the valve occurred during the
use of the Wassara hydraulic hammer, even if the valve was coated with
Tungsten Carbide (Ole, 2014). Similar erosion phenomenon was also
noted for the fluidic hammer (Peng et al., 2013). With a higher system
pressure drop, the bit hydraulics is always poor in deep-hole drilling.
The poor bit hydraulics can result in the high cuttings concentration
problem mentioned above. Moreover, it will also result in various well-
drilling problems, such as repeated crushing, erosion, overheating, etc.,
which inevitably affect the ROP and increase the cost of well drilling
(Tibbitts et al., 1981).
As the solids clean-up at the bole bottom is closely correlated to the
bit hydraulics, the precise prediction of bit hydraulics, particularly the
flow velocity at bit nozzle outlet and corresponding velocity in annuli,
is very important for the evaluation of drilling parameters and bit
performance (Carlos et al., 2003). However, it is difficult to predict the
bit hydraulics due to the complex structure and motion of mechanical
components in upper drilling tools. Moreover, the measurement of flow

∗
Corresponding author. School of Geosciences and Info-Physics, Central South University, Changsha, PR China.
E-mail address: heyong18@csu.edu.cn (Y. He).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.petrol.2018.12.072
Received 24 September 2018; Received in revised form 1 December 2018; Accepted 26 December 2018
Available online 30 December 2018
0920-4105/ © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
D. Wu et al.
rate in pulsating flows is much more difficult than that in steady flows
(Nabavi and Siddiqui, 2010). Exiting methods of measuring pulsating
flows cannot be used to estimate the pulsation of flow rate caused by
fluidic hammer due to the problem of installation and the limit of
working condition with high vibratory frequency. For instance, the flow
meters with a hollow cylinder structure for fluid passage are re-
commended for the purpose of easy installation and less pressure loss
during measurement. In this respect, some flow meters such as turbine
flow meter are not suitable. Analogously, some indirect measurement
methods based on particle image velocimetry or laser Doppler veloci-
metry are not considered due to their requirement of high optical
transmittance to devices. Due to the sensitivity to mechanical vibration
some flow meters such as coriolis flow meter cannot be used as well.
Despite that electromagnetic and ultrasonic flow meters can avoid the
aforementioned difficulties, however, their minimal response time
(approximate 0.1s) cannot meet the measuring requirement of fluidic
hammer with typical operation frequencies (Nabavi and Siddiqui, 2010;
Werzner et al., 2011). The difficulty of measurement is possible to be
the reason why the effects of the fluidic hammer or other kinds of hy-
draulic hammer on the hole cleaning associated with bit hydraulics
remain unclear (Nabavi and Siddiqui, 2010; Naderi and Khamehchi,
2018), which is likely to be a neglected issue.
It is worth noting that the bit nozzle may have an effect on the
performance of a hydraulic hammer. Previous literature has showed the
sensitivity of a mud hammer to the back pressure (Tibbitts et al., 2002).
For instance, the MHN5 mud hammer worked better at lower borehole
pressures, but at higher borehole pressures the performance was in the
lower range (Tibbitts et al., 2002). As the drill bit is directly connected
to the fluidic hammer, the back pressure of the fluidic hammer may be
affected by the pressure drop related with the bit nozzle diameter. Thus,
for a better match between the fluidic hammer and drill bit, it is ne-
cessary to ensure whether or not the pressure drop caused by drill bit
could affect the performance of the fluidic hammer.
Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) constitutes nowadays an in-
contestably powerful route to predict bit hydraulics for its cost effec-
tiveness, time-saving and convenience in avoiding some difficulties for
experiment. Moslemi and Ahmadi evaluated the hydraulic performance
of fixed-cutter drill bits using ANSYS-FLUENT (Moslemi and Ahmadi,
2014). Ong et al. studied the PDC bit hydraulics and mud rheology
using CFD analysis (Ong et al., 2017). Nevertheless, most of the present
literatures were conducted based on conventional steady analysis. The
steady-state analysis method cannot be used to analyse fluid-structure
interactions between the fluidic hammer and drill bit because of its
incapability to predict the motion of moving objects and the change in
the flow field.
During recent years, the dynamic mesh technique has attracted in-
creasingly more attention from researchers for its precise prediction of
unsteady flows related to complex moving objects (Açıkgöz and Aslan,
2016; Ghatage et al., 2017; Tao et al., 2017). Peng et al. showed the
effects of geometric parameters of a bistable fluidic amplifier on its
threshold flow velocity using the dynamic mesh method (Peng et al.,
2013). Zhang et al. used the dynamic mesh method to evaluate the
effect of a throttling plate in a fluidic oscillator (Zhang et al., 2017). In
this work, a dynamic mesh approach was proposed to show hydro-
dynamic interactions between a fluidic hammer and drill bit instead of
the conventional steady analysis.
2. Numerical analysis
2.1. Description of the fluidic hammer and a ball-tooth bit
The schematic of the fluidic hammer is shown in Fig. 1. The fluidic
hammer is designed based on a fluidic amplifier making it possible for
the flow to switch over in an alternation fashion between two direc-
tions. The flow adheres in stable fashion to one of the fluidic amplifier
surfaces and drives down an impacting body (consisting of a steel mass
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Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering 175 (2019) 536–546
Fig. 1. Schematic of the fluidic hammer with a ball-tooth bit.
block, piston, and piston rod) to strike the rear of the bit. Then, the flow
would be switched to the other direction when the impacting body
strikes to an end. To simplify the analysis, several assumptions were
employed as follows:
(1) There was no consideration of the slip wall;
(2) the thermal effect (including density variation caused by thermal
expansion) was ignored; and
(3) the system leakage was not considered.
2.2. Definition of the deforming domains in the dynamic mesh
The two-phase flow model was not considered during this simula-
tion due to the complicated nature of the mesh in this case and poor
convergence performance during multiphase simulation. The compu-
tational domain consists of the deforming domains related to the im-
pacting body and the un-deforming domains, as shown in Fig. 2. In the
deforming domains, the cells are allowed to be compressed or stretched
with the moving impacting body. The deforming cells would be up-
dated by splitting or merging according to the predefined split factor
and collapse factor when the deformation is too great. The upper and
lower surfaces of the piston in the rear and front piston chambers are
defined as the moving rigid body, while the lateral surfaces of the rear
and front piston chambers are defined as the boundaries of the de-
forming domains. Notably, the grids in this deforming domain should
be structured for the purpose of regular deformation.
The motion of the piston rod and steel mass block cannot be defined
in the same manner due to the complexity of the mass-block structure.
Stationary boundaries were defined at the upper and lower surfaces of
the chamber (yellow domain) in which the steel mass block and piston
rod move. The whole cells in this chamber except those in stationary
boundaries were developed as an entity to move. Due to the definition
of a stationary boundary even a complex structure with unstructured
triangular grids was allowed. To simplify the model, the notches at the
rear of a bit as the flow passages were replaced by a cylinder equivalent
domain.
In Fluent, the motion of the piston and hammer can be described by
means of user-defined functions (UDFs). In one time-step, Fluent in-
vokes the UDF to calculate the flow around the impacting body and the
forces exerted by the flow. Then, the position, velocity, and acceleration
of the impacting body are calculated and updated within the UDF.
2.3. Boundary and initial conditions
The k-ε turbulence model based on the renormalisation group
(RNG) was employed in this simulation. The simulation was divided
into two stages: a steady stage and an unsteady stage. The calculated
results for the steady stage were used as the initial conditions of the
unsteady stage. Stride lengths of each gait were kept constant at
D. Wu et al.
Fig. 2. A typical meshed computational domain of a fluidic hammer with a ball-tooth bit.
0.0001 s for a more detailed and precise description of the switching
process of the inlet jet. Considering the flow cases do not involve any
discontinuities, the pressure-based segregated algorithm, which is a
semi-implicit method for pressure-linked equations (SIMPLE) based on
the predictor-corrector approach, was employed to save computational
effort and time (Açikgöz and Aslan, 2016; Erge et al., 2015). A second-
order scheme was simultaneously adopted for a more precise solution.
To obtain reliable numerical results, the numerical values used in this
manuscript are all in the realistic range for real drilling operations. The
effects of temperature and pipe eccentricity were not considered during
this study.
2.4. Grid independence
To ensure the accuracy of the simulation, grid independence was
conducted and the results were shown in Table 1. According to Table 1,
the difference in the calculated results between “Coarse” and “Fine”
was approximately 20%, while the difference between the “Fine” and
“Finer” was only 2.2%. That is, the number of cells of approximately 1.8
million (“Fine”) is more reasonable considering the accuracy and cal-
culation time.
3. Experimental setup
A schematic of the flow loop identifying the associated individual
equipment is shown in Fig. 3. The annular section of the well borehole
simulator has a total length of 2 m. The inner diameter of the borehole
was 104 mm and the outer diameter of the drill pipe, fluidic hammer,
and drill bit was 73 mm, 86 mm, and 90 mm, respectively. To avoid
undesirable damage to the joint, the fluidic hammer with drill bit was
tightly fixed on the surface of the pedestal. In addition, the impact noise
was recorded to obtain the frequency of the fluidic hammer. The
pressure data was measured using a pressure transducer (CTS) with a
range of 0–70 bar and a nominal accuracy of 0.25%–0.5% FS. A pres-
sure-stabilizing tank was used to ensure the stability of the total inlet
pressure. In this case, the cycle fluid was water and a high-pressure
plunger pump (3P30) with a nominal flow rate of 250 L/min was used
as the flow source. The flow rate was controlled by a continuously
variable transmission (CVT) connected to the high-pressure plunger
pump.
Table 1
Calculation results of different cell numbers.
Specification Number of cells Inlet pressure (MPa)
Coarse 903301 11.3
Fine 1818262 12.9
Finer 2624790 13.1
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Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering 175 (2019) 536–546
4. Results and discussion
4.1. Effects of the drill bit on the performance of the fluidic hammer
According to our previous experience, the frequency of a fluidic
hammer is closely correlated to the inlet flow rate, parameters of the
fluidic amplifier, and stroke of the piston. The effect of bit nozzle size
on the fluidic hammer frequency with a 200-L/min flow rate (the de-
fault flow rate in the following descriptions) is shown in Fig. 4. As seen
in Fig. 4, the frequency shows a negligible change with the variation in
bit nozzle diameter, implying that a throttling effect driven by the bit
nozzle has a negligible effect on the performance of the fluidic hammer.
That is, there is no need to consider the influence of bit nozzle size or
structure on the performance of the fluidic hammer before designing a
drill bit or using a fluidic hammer. In this case, the CFD approach for
the prediction of the frequency of the fluidic hammer is higher than that
from the experiments, with a maximum error at 14.7%. This is perhaps
due to the leakage or energy loss at the moment of impacting body
rebounding.
Fig. 5 shows the results of mean pressure drop versus nozzle size at
the inlet and discharge outlet of the fluidic hammer. Note that although
the pressure varied obviously with the bit nozzle diameter, however,
the pressure drops between the fluid hammer inlet and the discharge
outlet with different nozzle sizes were nearly the same. It implies that
the variation in the pressure caused by the nozzle diameter would be
directly reflected in the increase in inlet pressure due to the pressure
differential loop of the piston and incompressibility of the water. The
pressure drop will not influence the flow switch of fluidic amplifier if
the parameters of the fluidic amplifier structure are reasonable. This is
perhaps why the frequency of the fluidic hammer in Fig. 4 showed no
obvious correlation with the bit nozzle diameter. In this view, the
fluidic hammer or the oscillator based on the fluidic hammer maybe
allowed to be connected to the nozzle with higher pressure drop. The
bit hydraulics should be a priority considering the insensitivity of the
fluidic hammer to back pressure variation. It should also be noted that
the parameters of a fluidic amplifier must be appropriately adjusted,
otherwise the results for the fluidic amplifier with improper parameters
or sensitive parameters to pressure could be different.
4.2. Effects of the fluidic hammer on the drill bit hydraulics
Generally, the penetration rate is closely correlated to the bit hy-
draulics (Tibbitts et al., 1981). A typical working process for the fluidic
hammer and its velocity contour plots are shown in Fig. 6. As shown in
Fig. 6, the velocity flow fields, including the flow in the fluidic hammer
and that near the bottom hole, are closely correlated to the re-
ciprocating movement of the impacting body. A distinct difference in
the velocity fields between the impacting stroke and returning stroke
for the impacting body was found. For the returning stroke, whose inlet
D. Wu et al.
Fig. 3. Schematic view of the flow loop for the fluidic hammer in the wellbore hole simulator.
Fig. 4. Effect of bit nozzle diameter on the frequency and maximum velocity of
the impacting body of the fluidic hammer.
flow adheres to the right surface of the fluidic amplifier, the flow rate
into the drill bit increased with the upward motion of the piston. A
higher crossflow velocity with broader distribution can be observed
near the bottom hole, while for the impacting stroke, the velocity near
the bottom hole turns to decrease with the downward motion of piston.
As the flow velocity is closely correlated to borehole cleaning and
cooling (Ramadana et al., 2004), the lower flow velocity during im-
pacting at the bottom hole requires attention, particularly for high-
temperature geothermal well and deep-hole drilling.
The obvious flow fluctuation caused by the fluidic hammer at the
drill bit can be interpreted by the area deviation of the piston. In gen-
eral, there are two directions for the fluid flowing into the fluidic
hammer: one is into the rear piston chamber or front piston chamber to
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Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering 175 (2019) 536–546
Fig. 5. Mean pressure profiles with different nozzle diameters at the inlet and
discharge outlet of the fluidic hammer.
drive the piston, the other is into the drill bit for cooling and cleaning
the bottom hole. The flow variation associated with the area deviation
of the piston (Fig. 7) can be simply described as follows:
π
Q = Qs + v (D 2 − d 2)
4 (1)
Where Q is the flow rate into the drill bit; Qs is the total inlet flow
rate into the fluidic hammer, v is the velocity of the piston; and D and d
are the diameter of the piston and piston rod, respectively. For the
impact stroke, v is a negative value. The flow rate into the rear piston
chamber is higher compared with the flow out of the front chamber in
the same time. For the returning stroke, the result is the reverse.
The predictions of the flow rate variation for different Qs are shown
in Fig. 8. As we all know, the flow rate has an important influence on
D. Wu et al.
Fig. 6. Velocity flow fields of the fluidic hammer and bottom hole during the work of the fluidic hammer.
Fig. 7. Schematic view of the piston of the fluidic hammer.
the borehole cleaning and cooling (Yan et al., 2018). As shown in Fig. 8,
obvious flow fluctuation can be observed with the flow rate varying
from 125 L/min to 175 L/min. With a higher piston velocity during the
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Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering 175 (2019) 536–546
impacting stroke, the maximum flow reduction is greater than the
maximum increase on the flow rate during the returning stroke. How-
ever, the duration of the flow reduction is shorter compared with that of
the flow increase.
To further understand the effect of flow fluctuation, the flow fluc-
tuation ratio (henceforth “w”) was introduced to describe the flow
fluctuation at the drill bit as follows:
Q max−Q min
w=
Qs (2)
where Qmax and Qmin represent the maximum flow rate and minimum
flow rate, respectively. As shown in Fig. 9a, the value of w remains
constant for different Qs. In other words, w shows no correlation with
the inlet flow rate. However, the frequency f of the fluidic hammer
significantly increased with Qs, implying that the flow fluctuation per
unit time increased with Qs. In Fig. 9b, the correlations with M sig-
nificantly improved. Given the noticeable effect of M on the flow
fluctuation, both w and f decreased with the increase in M. A negative
D. Wu et al.
Fig. 8. Time history of the flow rate into the drill bit for different total inlet flows: (a) 125 L/min; (b) 150 L/min; (c) 175 L/min.
correlation between d and w can be seen in Fig. 9c. Notably, d should
not be too large because an oversized diameter of piston rod would
result in obvious reduction of f due to the difficulty in the returning for
the impacting body. As seen in Fig. 9d, w is nearly proportional to D but
f decreases with an increasing D. The flow fluctuation per unit time is
likely to increase with the increase in D because the variation in f seems
not particularly significant.
High turbulence intensity characterised by an intensive turbulent
mixing with increased instantaneous velocities shows high erosion po-
tential, particularly in regards to the flow with fine particles (Kozioł
et al., 2017). The turbulence intensity I in the annuli between the drill
bit and borehole was used instead of the relative turbulence intensity in
this work as follows:
I= u2 − U
where u is the fluctuation velocity and U is the time-averaged point
velocity. The profiles of turbulence intensity I with different values of
Fig. 9. Profiles of flow fluctuation ratio at different total inlet flows, mass of steel mass blocks, diameters of piston, and piston rods, respectively.
Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering 175 (2019) 536–546
Qs, M, d, and D are shown in Fig. 10. The turbulence intensity is pro-
portional to Qs (Fig. 10a) and D (Fig. 10d), while negative correlations
with M and d were observed as shown in Fig. 10b and c. However, the
effect of M on turbulence intensity was not particularly significant
compared with Qs, D, and d. Only a less than 0.15 m/s variation in
turbulence intensity was observed when the value of M tripled.
Eddies, associated with fluctuations in the flow velocity and tur-
bulence, are crucial for determining particle transport and deposition
(Kozioł et al., 2017). Fig. 11 graphically shows the bottom-hole flow
field characteristics. As seen in Fig. 11, there are some bit vortexes
distributed on the both left side (AB section) and right side (BC section)
of the bit nozzle exit. Obviously, it is more difficult for the impingement
jet to flow towards the BC direction due to a wide range of larger
vortexes. In addition, the ball tooth in the BC section would inevitably
(3) hinder the transportation of cuttings. Hence, the flow characteristics in
the AB section were the main concern during this study.
The streamlines between the bit nozzle exit and the nearest wall of
541
D. Wu et al. Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering 175 (2019) 536–546

Fig. 10. Turbulence intensity versus total inlet flow, mass of steel mass block, and diameter of piston and piston rod, respectively.

the borehole (AB section) at different moments are presented in Figs. 12

Fig. 11. Streamline plot of the drill bit.
and 13. In these figures, the bit nozzle exit is on the left side and the
annular space is on the right side. For the process of the returning stroke
(Fig. 12), the curvature of the vortices near the nozzle exit increasingly
decreases as the impacting body moves. This can be explained by the
continuous velocity variation in which the increasing flow velocity
produces a dramatically changing shear layer associated with large
vortices. The vortices near the drill bit nozzle may be beneficial to in-
itiate cuttings movement and suspend cuttings at the bottom hole.
Fig. 13 presents the variation in the streamlines during the process
of an impacting stroke. The vortices were weaker for the impacting
stroke compared with that of the returning stroke because of the lower
flow velocity. The centre of the vortices with smaller streamline cur-
vature gradually moves towards the wall of the borehole. It is inferred
that the variation in the velocity gradient is the main cause of the
change of the flow fields. As the flow rate decreased with time, the flow
velocity at the same position gradually decreased. The closer to the
nozzle outlet, the more obvious the velocity decrease. Thus, the centre
of the vortices gradually occurred at the position near the wall of the
borehole.
To validate the aforementioned conclusions and demonstrate the
difference between dynamic analysis and steady analysis, the steady
flow fields in the AB section with different inlet flow rates are shown in
Fig. 14. It can be seen that the distributions of the streamlines for dif-
ferent Qs values are quite similar. The difference seems to be only re-
flected in the value of the velocity for each simulation group. It brings
assumptions, that such result was possibly due to the lack of a de-
scription of the temporal and spatial interaction between the fluid
elements produced by the velocity variation. In this respect, the vortices
will only be observed at the position with obvious change of flow path.
This is why the vortices only occur at the position near the annular

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D. Wu et al. Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering 175 (2019) 536–546

Fig. 12. Streamline plots between the bit nozzle exit and the nearest wall of the borehole during the returning stroke.

Fig. 13. Streamline plots between the bit nozzle exit and the nearest wall of the borehole during the impacting stroke.

space between the drill bit and wall of the borehole.
4.3. Effects of the fluidic hammer on the flow in the annuli
Fig. 15 presents the maximum and minimum Reynolds number in
the annular space between the drill pipe and wall of the borehole for
different Qs. As the diameter ratio k is approximately 0.7 in this case,
the lowest critical Rec is no more than 2750 according to previous
works (Dou et al., 2010; Erge et al., 2015). As shown in Fig. 15, even the
smallest Re is greater than 2750, implying that the annular flows in this
case are all turbulent at any time. According to previous literature, the
effect of pipe eccentricity on borehole cleaning is moderate under
turbulent flow and significant for laminar flow for high inclination
angles between 55° and 90° (Ford et al., 1990). In this respect, no
consideration of pipe eccentricity is acceptable in this case.
As a result of the flow fluctuation, a maximum value of the average

543
D. Wu et al.
Fig. 14. Streamline plots of steady state flow at various inlet flow rates: (a) 125; (b) 150; (c) 175; (d) 200.
Fig. 15. Reynolds number in annuli versus Qs.
velocity and a minimum value of the average velocity in the annular
space occur. To thoroughly understand the effect of flow fluctuation,
the average velocity by different Qs values in the annular space between
the drill pipe and the wall of the borehole can be seen in Fig. 16. Also
depicted in Fig. 16 is the relationship between the annular flow velocity
and cutting concentration for laminar flow and turbulence flow re-
spectively. The critical velocity of the laminar flow to initiate or sus-
pend particle movement with water was higher than that of the tur-
bulence flow (Ibrahim and Musa, 2003). For a cutting concentration of
less than 10%, the required velocity for laminar flow is merely ap-
proximately 0.3 m/s while the required velocity for turbulent flow is
approximately 0.6 m/s. Considering that the annular flow in this case is
turbulent and the average annular velocity at a maximum for
Qs = 100 L/min is less than 0.6 m/s, the lower limit value of Qs should
be higher than 100 L/min to ensure annular hole-cleaning.
In addition, we can also evaluated the reasonableness of Qs by
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Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering 175 (2019) 536–546
Fig. 16. Qs vs average velocity in the annulus and the relationship between the
average annular velocity and cutting concentration.
comparing the annular velocity with critical velocity. Relevant data
from previous works are provided in Table 2. In general, two distinctly
different cutting transport mechanisms are identified for boreholes with
different inclination angles (Ford et al., 1990). For instance, for a
horizontal well, the cuttings can be transported to the surface by a
rolling motion along the low-side wall of the annulus. For a vertical
well, however, the cuttings must be transported in suspension in the
circulating fluid. As the parameters of annular space in this case are
similar to the data from Ma et al., it can be inferred that the critical
velocity of the suspension for this case is likely to be a value in the
range of from 0.78 m/s to 1.46 m/s. Therefore, the minimum value of
Qs should be greater than 125 L/min. As the critical velocity of rolling is
lower than that of suspension (Ford et al., 1990), the lower limit value
of Qs for the inclined well would be less than 125 L/min.
D. Wu et al.
Table 2
Experimental results of critical velocity for hole cleaning.
Fluid d (mm) D (mm) Cuttings Size (mm)
Water 35.0 95.0 0.35
Water 35.0 95.0 1.20
Water 60.3 101.6 2.50
Water 88.9 101.6 2.50
Water 26.2 127.0 3.66
5. Conclusions
A dynamic mesh approach was developed for the prediction of hy-
drodynamic interactions between a fluidic hammer and drill bit.
Several concluding remarks can be provided from the present work.
1. The effect of a pressure drop caused by the bit nozzle on the per-
formance of the fluidic hammer is negligible. However, the fluidic
hammer has a dramatic effect on the bit hydraulics. The work of the
fluidic hammer can result in obvious flow fluctuation, which is al-
ways correlated to borehole cleaning and cooling.
2. The flow fluctuation ratio was nearly constant during the variation
of total inlet flow rate. A negative relationship with the flow fluc-
tuation ratio was observed for the mass of the steel mass block and
diameter of piston rod, while the flow fluctuation ratio decreased
with the piston diameter.
3. The turbulence intensity in annuli is proportional to the total inlet
flow rate Qs and piston diameter D, and decreased with the increase
in the piston rod diameter d and mass of steel mass block M.
However, the effect of M was not particularly significant compared
with that of the other three factors.
4. A lowest and a highest average annular velocity occur because of the
flow fluctuation. To evaluate the rationality of the chosen total inlet
flow rate and maximise borehole cleaning, the lowest average ve-
locity in the annular space during flow fluctuation should be higher
than the critical velocity or the velocity associated with desired
cutting concentration.
5. Compared with the conventional steady analysis method, the dy-
namic mesh approach shows more advantages in the prediction of
the flow characteristics and description of flow field variation
caused by fluidic hammer. The conclusions above are useful in the
design of hydraulic hammers or vibratory tools.
Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of Funded by Open
Research Fund Program of Key Laboratory of Metallogenic Prediction of
Nonferrous Metals and Geological Environment Monitoring (Central
South University), Ministry of Education” (No. 2017YSJS10), China
Postdoctoral Science Foundation Funded Project (No. 2018M632993),
National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41872186 and No.
41807253) for this work.
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://
doi.org/10.1016/j.petrol.2018.12.072.
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