Wednesday, August 24, 2011

how hydraulic profiling and sonic drilling works

By Bryce Knightley


A sonic drill is more simply known as a rotary-vibratory drill. It's capable of high drilling speeds along with accomplishing tasks, for instance continuous coring that can't be performed by another equipment. A sonic drill rig looks very much like a conventional air or mud rotary drill rig. The most significant difference is within the drill head that is slightly greater than an ordinary rotary head. The head provides the mechanism necessary for rotary motion, along with an oscillator, which in turn causes a high frequency force to be superimposed around the drill string. The drill bit is physically vibrating up and down in addition to being pushed down and rotated. These three combined forces allow drilling to proceed rapidly through most geological formations including most types of rock.

The vibration motion triggers the surrounding soil particles to fluidize, thereby allowing trouble-free penetration. In rock, the drill bit will cause fractures on the rock face, creating dust and little rock particles, which facilitates continuing development of the drill bit. Normally the drilling and coring of rock and earth is often accomplished while not having to use any drilling fluid at all. This is an important requirement for environmental drilling projects. Compressed air, drill mud, or ordinary water works extremely well to remove the cuttings and quicken the operation further, depending on the application that the machine is necessary for.

The oscillator is driven by a hydraulic motor and uses out of balance weights to come up with high sinusoidal forces which is then transmitted to the drill bit. An air spring could also be incorporated to enable you to confine the alternating forces to the drill string. The frequency can be varied to match operating conditions and is generally between 50 and 120 hertz. For a comparison, ordinary household current in lots of countries alternates at 60 hertz. This frequency range falls inside the lower range of sound vibrations that the human ear is capable of hearing. Thus the term 'sonic drill' is applied to this class of rotary-vibratory drilling machine.

Although the principle behind the sonic drill would seem complicated, the equipment is actually quite simple to function. The driller only adds vibratory energy for the normal rotary motion. The user simply chooses a frequency that offers them the most beneficial drilling rate or best core recovery, as the case may be.

For example a hydraulic profiling tool makes it possible for the user to create fast, constant, real time profiles of soil hydraulic properties in both fine and aggressive grained material. The HPT uses a sensitive, down hole transducer to measure the pressure response of the soil to injection of water. One primary use of this tool is to locate and define preferential migration pathways for contaminants from the subsurface. It may also be used to target zones for injection of remediation material. Furthermore, the HPT can be used to select well screen intervals, review locations to carry out slug checks, and measure static water conditions across a site.



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