On the Wellbore Contact of Drill Strings in a Finite Element Model

In drill string dynamics the Finite Element Method is usually applied to models of very long drill strings in a wellbore with arbitrary curvature. Taking account of geometrical constraint between the drill string and the wellbore, a high density of nodes is necessary. This density is much higher than the one needed to describe the natural vibrations properly, so this firstly leads to an extension of the computing time. A penalty function is frequently utilized to describe the contact problem between the drill string and the wellbore where the contact normal force acts only on the nodal points of the drill string. It was recognized that only node-to-surface contact models cannot fulfill this geometrical constraint, because the segment between two nodal points deeply penetrates the wellbore wall in some cases. A process with Gaussian points along the segment in time domain will be introduced, so that the drill string will be described according to this geometrical constraint with good accuracy but with a smaller density of nodes and less computing time. (© 2013 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)