A review of drillstring vibration modeling and suppression methods

Drilling is one of the most costly and risky activities in oil and gas reservoir exploration and field development. A portion of this high cost is related to unwanted vibrations of the drillstring. With the advancement of Measurement While Drilling (MWD) tools and their real-time implementation, vibration models are still a valuable tool for pre-drilling analyses, designing the bottomhole assembly (BHA) and sensitivity analyses of the input parameters. In the last 70 years, a wide variety of models has been developed for design and analysis of drilling structures. Due to the complexity of downhole interactions and excitations a variety of modeling simplifications and assumptions is typically made. This paper presents a broad survey of the drillstring vibration modeling literature. The state-of-the-art of models for predicting axial, torsional and bending vibrations (uncoupled and coupled), boundary condition assumptions, equation formulation methods, and applications to vibration mitigation is reviewed. Moreover, the challenges of drillstring vibration modeling in the presence of modern drilling techniques such as deviated drilling and use of vibrating downhole tools are discussed. This survey is intended to organize and summarize the vast amount of literature in the field, and to aid engineers in both industry and academia in developing, choosing, or critically assessing the limitations of drillstring vibration models. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.