A Near-Vertical Well Attitude Measurement Method with Redundant Accelerometers and MEMS IMU/Magnetometers

Abstract

Vertical drilling is the first stage of petroleum exploitation and directional well technology. The near-vertical attitude at each survey station directly determines the whole direction accuracy of the borehole trajectory. However, the attitude measurement for near-vertical wells has poor azimuth accuracy because the poor signal-to-noise ratio of radial accelerometers hardly obtains the correct horizontal attitude, especially the roll angle. In this paper, a novel near-vertical attitude measurement method was proposed to address this issue. The redundant micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) accelerometers were employed to replace the original accelerometers from MEMS inertial measurement unit (IMU)/magnetometers for calculating horizontal attitude under near-vertical conditions. In addition, a simplified four-position calibration method for the redundant accelerometers was proposed to compensate for the installation and non-orthogonal error. We found that the redundant accelerometers enhanced the signal-to-noise ratio to upgrade the azimuth accuracy at the near-vertical well section. Compared with the traditional method, the experiment results show that the average azimuth errors and roll errors are reduced from 34.45° and 27.09° to 5.7° and 0.61°, respectively. The designed configuration scheme is conducive to the miniaturized design and low-cost requirements of wellbore measuring tools. The proposed attitude measurement method can effectively improve the attitude accuracy of near-vertical wells.