Turbodrill Design and Performance Analysis

Turbodrill (turbine down hole motor) has been recently proposed by the authors as the preferred drive mechanism with high rotation speed for hard rocks drilling for deep mineral exploration applications.Turbodrill is a type of hydraulic axial turbomachinery in which turbine motor section has multistage of rotors and stators that convert the hydraulic power provided by the drilling fluid to mechanical power with diverting the fluid flow through the stator vanes to rotor vanes. This paper presents a methodology for designing multistage turbodrills with asymmetric rotor and stator blades configurations. The numerical simulation approach and the simulations results carried out using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code for the proposed small size model of turbodrill stage with different drilling fluid (mud) types and various mass flow rates are presented. As a result optimum operational parameters are proposed for gaining the required rotation speed and torque for hard rocks drilling.