Experimental and Optimization Design of Offshore Drilling Seal

Three-cone bit is the key equipment in the exploration of the oil in offshore drilling and exploration, the bearing system and the seal system are the critical components for the bit. Especially in the offshore drilling environment, the seal design need to be carefully considered. A multi-objective optimization design including orthogonal design method and F-test with finite element analysis for a three-cone bit seal is proposed. Firstly, the calculation method of optimization targets are given, including the minimization of maximum contact pressure and leakage rate analyzed by ANSYS and MATLAB respectively, to maximize seal life and reliability. Then, an orthogonal experiment approach is used to investigate the effects of the eleven parameters on the seal performance, and the influence degrees of the seal factors on the optimization targets have been confirmed by F-test, and the reasonable factors can be determined by the trend of the targets. Finally, in order to validate the analysis results, a new seal was designed and tested on a seal tester compared to the previous seal. In this test, the seal maximum interface temperature that reflects the position of maximum contact pressure can be obtained by using three high precision thermocouples. Both the experiment results and the numerical analyses proved that the maximum contact pressure and leakage rate of the improved seal have been reduced compared to the previous.