Automating Drilling Practices to Compensate for Interactions Between Tool Joints and the Rotating Head

The use of managed pressure drilling (MPD) equipment on North America land rigs has become more common over the past several years. Standard and heavy weight drill pipe tool joints require more weight to pass through the rotating head than the pipe bodies. The negative impacts of this phenomena on both rate of penetration (ROP) and downhole dynamics have been previously studied and published. Various methods of manually adjusting AutoDriller setpoints have been presented as industry best practices. This paper presents the automation of industry best practices through the rig's process control system. Implementation and scaling across a rig fleet will also be discussed. Using a patented process (Scotvold et al. 2020), an application was developed to run on the rig's process control system, where AutoDriller setpoints are automatically adjusted as the tool joints pass through the rotating head on each stand. Different methods of AutoDriller control can be utilized to achieve the intended result. Design of the application to minimize human error when configuring for specific pipe will be a focus, as well as challenges encountered with this in the past. Numerous examples, methods, and control methods such as manually adding weight across tool joints, using ROP as a control method, and automating the process with different logic will be compared. Analysis of these scenarios will demonstrate the value of consistency by removing as much human intervention and setup from the operation as possible. This paper presents the full automation of industry best practices that have historically been conducted through repetitive manual tasks. In addition, there is a strong focus on improving system autonomy going forward to minimize the level of human intervention and setup that is required for optimal performance while drilling with MPD equipment. Ease of scalability for automating this process will also be discussed as it was a major consideration when developing the application.