1

FEA Based Design Optimization to Mitigate Anchor Cage Impact Damage Risk

Ganesh Nanaware

ATCx Houston, October 2015

Agenda

Introduction

About Baker Hughes

Background

Anchor cage Impact Simulation

Design optimization to Mitigate Impact Risk

Results

Summary

2

Leading supplier of oilfield services, products, technology, and

systems to the worldwide oil and natural gas industry.

Operates globally with approximately 60,000 employees.

Headquarter in Houston, Texas.

$24.55 billion USD in revenue in 2014

About Baker Hughes

3

Background

4

Anchor cage subassembly is a part of overall expandable liner hanger setting tool, operates and moves with considerably high velocity and impacts the other parts of the setting tool when the hydraulic pressure reaches a certain level. This impact load increases the risk of structural damage to other parts of setting tool.

Internal Pressure

Test Observations

5

FEA Simulation – Cage Impact in Air

6

Initial Design : After Impact

7

-6

-4

-2

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

18

20

0.00E+00 5.00E-02 1.00E-01 1.50E-01 2.00E-01 2.50E-01 3.00E-01

Vel

oci

ty (

foo

t/se

c)

Time

Cage Impact Velocity

Cage Impact Velocity

16.4 foot/sec

About 4 foot/sec rebound

7

FEA Simulation – Cage Impact in Air

8

8

Impact Damage Risk

Plastic Deformation (0.034” to 0.039” radial deformation)

0.012” to 0.14” radial deformation

9

9

Impact Damage Mitigation Plan

Strategy : Add Crush Ring to absorb impact Energy and minimize damage on impacting cage.

Crush Ring

Before Impact

After Impact After Impact

10

10

Crush Ring Design Optimization

Design Optimization

Variables : Material, Diameter, Crush Length, Taper,

Groove Depth, Type of Groove, # of grooves, slot width/taper

11

11

Final Crush Ring Design

Final design proposal was selected based on the impact performance, manufacturing constraints, and easy replacement of crush ring after each field run.

Crush ring Washer

Key

Cap Screw

FEA Simulation – Final Design (Cage Impact in Air)

12

Final Design : After Impact

13

13

Crush Ring Deformation Results

Deformed Min ID= 2.83” (Original Min ID 2.96”)

Deformed Max OD= 4.18” (Original Max OD 4.075”)

Crushed length 0.86” (Original length 1.25”)

14

14

Final Crush Ring Design : Results

Aluminum Crush ring with taper and crush initiator grooves, PTFE Washer

Before Impact After Impact

Plastic strain on Cap screw and key

Plastic strain on cage

Red color shows plastic strain > 2%

Cap Screw

PTFE Washer Key

After Impact

FE Model Size

More than 3 million elements and nodes

Software

Hypermesh and Abaqus/CAE to Pre and Post Processing

Abaqus/Explicit as Simulation Solver

Hardware

High Performance Computing (HPC) to run jobs;

Cores per Analysis job = 16 cores, 16GB RAM Each

Computational wall-clock time per single step analysis job : 24h:25m:13s

Simulation Resource

15

FEA based simulations using Altair HyperWorks and other software’s helped us

to

Identify design limitations, capture anchor cage failure modes

Explore multiple design alternatives for the crush ring design to improve

Optimize the anchor product performance to mitigate the impact damage risk

for the anchor cage subassembly before building costly multiple physical

prototypes

16

Summary

17

Questions ?

ATCx Houston, October 2015