Factors Met While Selecting Optimal Float Equipment

By Author: Anil
Total Articles: 266
Comment this article

Selecting optimal float equipment is not a simple task. Many cementing technologies are required that meet engineered work to deliver high reliability over deepwater drilling environments. Now, float equipments are often considered as low tech commodity product and so operators select this floating equipment supplier in India on the basis of cost and design.
There are various cementing casing accessories manufacturers in India that withstand extreme conditions like flow induced abrasion, tensile force, plug bump pressure, backpressure, etc. Therefore, one must fully understand the risk of selecting a float equipment package for any cementing application.
1. Pre-Job Planning
Failure modes are usually because of either manufacturing errors or design flaws; but sometimes it may be due to underestimating fluid compression. This is true in case if deepwater wells that requires displacement volumes higher than 2000 bbl. If you’re using high compressible synthetic muds it can cause high compression with low bump-pressures. In order to overcome this problem, use compressible calculator that account inherent compression ...
... causing variation is fluid compressibility between synthetic based muds and water. Again, for handling bleedback volumes, you need to consider both the cases when floats and holding and when floats are not holding until cement is available.

2. Float Equipment Architecture
The three main components comprising in any Floating Equipment manufacturer in India are: concrete, the value and the steel hull. Even if all look fairly simple & straightforward, upon closer view they are critically important and must meet to hold differential pressure. Since each piece of float equipment is important, deepwater operators are increasingly adopting auto fill for their wells. These components must work seamlessly together and must have the ability to withstand backpressure as determined by the component strength (valve, concrete, and steel). In addition the float equipment must rely with the physical properties in order to resist from prolonged circulation; therefore these attributed must remain reliable and consistent.

3. Industry Guidelines
Operators can use the recommended practice for performance testing of cementing float equipment (API RP10F) as a guide to select floating equipment. However, it can only be measured with water based fluids for cementing and drilling walls and not in non water based fluids. The specification accurately describes the float equipment performance and uses separate tests parameter for each component. This helps the users better to understand and make best selection for various applications and identify them with most appropriate and cost effective equipment for each well.

4. Design Related facilities
The most case that leave float equipment vulnerable to failure is their inadequacies to design. Take for instance the case of valve design that should provide minimal restrictions and sufficient flow area for passing the debris out. Sometimes the objects get pumped or dropped into the casing which restrict its passing and leading to blockage and in ultimate failure. Since debris can settle in the mud thus accumulating the float equipment and plug; one should run a filter shoe also called Float collar Shoe Collar that may capture debris and minimize plugging risk. Any flow restriction in the float equipment can raise the risk and reduce well integrity and then lead to non-productive time to additional drilling out and other remedial interventions.