Flexible Multibody Approaches for Dynamical Simulation of Beam Structures in Drilling

Two approaches for simulation of dynamics of complex beam structures such as drill strings are considered.In the first approach, the drill string is presented as a set of uniform beams connected via force elements. The beams can undergo arbitrary large displacements as absolutely rigid bodies but its flexible displacements due to elastic deformations are assumed to be small. Flexibility of the beams is simulated using the modal approach. Thus, each beam has at least twelve degrees of freedom: six coordinates define position and orientation of a local frame and six modes are used for modeling flexibility.The second approach is dynamic simulation of the drill string using nonlinear finite element model. The proposed beam finite element uses Cartesian coordinates of its nodes and node rotation angles around axis of Cartesian coordinate system as generalized coordinates. The nonlinear finite element is developed based on method of large rotation vectors. Rotation angles in the nodes can be arbitrary large.Equations of motion of beam structure are derived in the paper. The number of degrees of freedom is decreased by factor two as compared with the modal approach. Thereby, computational efficiency under simulation of dynamics of long drill strings is considerably increased.The features of creating the models and numerical methods as well as results obtained by applying both approaches are discussed in the paper.Copyright © 2014 by ASME