Current Accumulator Design Methods Are Inadequate for Deepwater Drilling
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Current Accumulator Design Methods are Inadequate for Deep Water Drilling. Gas-Charged Accumulators are used in subsea drilling as well as production operations. One important application of accumulators is in blowout preventers (BOPs). BOPs are designed to shut in a well under pressure so that the well control procedures could be implemented. Control Systems for the BOPs should be highly efficient hydraulic systems and operate in as short a time as possible. Supplying enough volume of pressured hydraulic fluid to operate those emergency functions is essential. To have the necessary quantity of control fluid under pressure requires storing this fluid in accumulators. A problem may arise when the wellhead is at water depth of more than 3500 ft. In deep water drilling, the accumulators should be placed on the subsea BOP stack to reduce hydraulic response times and provide a hydraulic power supply in case of interruption of surface communication. Hydraulic fluid capacity of an accumulator may drop to 15% of its capacity on the surface and even less, depending on the water depth. The reason for this is that the nitrogen gas does not behave like an ideal gas as we go to very deep water, due to high hydrostatic pressure at that water depth. Now, we have to look for something that is able to store energy, but unlike the nitrogen, its functionality should not be affected by the increasing hydrostatic pressure of water. The possibility of the use of springs and heavy weights as possible replacements for nitrogen will be discussed. Efficient deep water accumulators would reduce the number of accumulators required in deepwater and cut the cost of the project. With the advent of such efficient accumulators, we can hope that one of the numerous problems of deepwater drilling has been solved and we can think of drilling in even deeper waters. Copyright 2006, Offshore Technology Conference.
