Our team has been working hard on an exciting digital twin R&D initiative that has been made possible through financial support by Innovation Norway.
The innovation of the project is simulator technology that enables the same hydraulics engine to be used effectively through all phases of the complete life-cycle of well construction, from the initial planning to real-time drilling advisory and control. The primary objective is to allow the handling of hydraulics model parameters in one place, cascading them through all of the phases.
Traditionally, planning, training, advisory and operational control tools each employ different calculation methodologies and solvers. Furthermore, they have been developed on different platforms, each operating in isolation from the other. This introduces large opportunities for input error, deviation from expected results, and data re-entry end-user frustration.
This project uses new results from research on fast multiphase models combined with the latest improvements of cloud-based technology to develop a hydraulics engine that can be used for effective simulations of all time-scales from steady-state to full transient simulations. This enables the same hydraulics engine to be used for effective simulations on the scale of hours and days of drilling in the planning phase, to realistic simulator-based training on well control incidents with compressible gas transport on a minutes scale, to full transient simulations with high-frequency pressure wave transients for controller testing in the seconds scale.
We have now reached the first milestone of the project, and are ready to release the first module of the simulator, named LeidarPlan. We are excited about what we’ve developed so far, and will have more news very soon.
LeidarPlan, soon to be released.