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Criteria of design improvement of shaped charges used as oil well perforators
[Thesis]. Manchester, UK: The University of Manchester; 2012.
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Abstract
In addition to its various military applications, shaped charges have been used in oil industry as an oil well perforator (OWP) to connect oil and gas to their reservoirs. The collapse of the liner material under the explosive load produces a hypervelocity jet capable of achieving a deep penetration tunnel into the rock formation. The achieved penetration depends on the OWP design, which includes the geometry and the material of the explosive and the liner as well as the initiation mode and the casing of the shaped charge. The main purpose of this research is to assess the performance of OWP with different design aspects in terms of its penetration depth into concrete material.This research employed the Autodyn finite difference code to model the behaviour of OWPs in the stages of liner collapse, jet formation and jet penetration. The design parameters of OWPs were studied quantitatively to identify the effect of each individual parameter on the jet characteristics and the jet penetration depth into concrete material according to the API-RP43 standard test configuration. In order to validate the Autodyn jetting analysis, this research compared the jetting simulation results of copper OWP liners with those obtained from flash x-ray measurements while the numerical jet penetration into the laminated concrete target was validated experimentally by the static firing of OWPs. Above-mentioned experiments were designed and performed in this project.The validated hydrocode was implemented in this research to study the effects of the concrete target strength, the liner material and the liner shape on the jet penetration depth into concrete targets.For the target strength, the traditional virtual origin (VO) penetration model was modified to include a strength reduction term based on Johnson’s damage number and the effect of the underground confinement pressure using Drucker-Prager model. The VO analytical model is also implemented in the liner material study to account for the jet density reduction phenomena and its induced reduction of jet penetration capability. The jets obtained from machined copper and zirconium liners and from copper-tungsten powder liner all exhibited the density reduction phenomena. The modified VO model considers the non-uniform distribution of jet density based on the jet profile analysis using Autodyn and the experimental soft recovery for some tested liners. The results lead to a modified VO penetration model including the non-uniform jet density effect.For zirconium liner material, numerical and analytical studies were conducted for different flow velocities and different collapse angles in order to determine the boundaries between the jetting and non-jetting phases and whether a coherent or a non-coherent jet will form. This study indicated that the suggested four different liner shapes (i.e. the conical, the biconical, the hemispherical and the bell) will produce coherent jet when the zirconium is used as OWP liner.The validated Autodyn hydrocode is also used in this thesis to calculate the velocity difference between two neighbouring zirconium jet fragments. The velocity difference is related directly to the breakup time of an OWP jet, and thus, it is calculated for a range of zirconium liners with different liner wall thicknesses. The calculated values of velocity difference gave a clear insight for the breakup time formulae for zirconium jet in terms of the liner thickness and the charge diameter.