Vibration of Periodic Drill-Strings with Local Sources of Resonance

Abstract

A new class of drill-strings is proposed for attenuating undesirable vibrations to ensure effective operation. The drill-string is provided with passive periodic inserts, which are integrated with sources of local resonance (LR). The inserts make the drill-string act as a low frequency pass mechanical filter for the transmission of vibration along the drill-string. Proper design of the periodic inserts with sources of LR tend to shift these stop bands towards zones of lower frequencies to enable confining the dominant modes of vibration of the drill-string within these bands. In this manner, propagation of the vibration along the drill-string can be completely blocked. A finite element model (FEM) is developed using ANSYS to investigate the bandgap characteristics of the proposed drill-string with sources of LR. The developed FEM accounts for bending, torsional, and axial vibrations of the drill-string in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the periodic inserts with LR in simultaneous control of these combined modes as compared to conventional solid periodic inserts, which are only limited to controlling bending vibrations. The effect of the design parameters of the periodic inserts with LR on the bandgap characteristics of the drill-string is investigated to establish guidelines of this class of drill-strings.