Enhancement of drill string system operations with adaptive robust controller and hardware in-the-loop validation

Abstract

Drilling operations are associated with severe vibrations that lead to an inefficient process. Stick–slip vibration presents one of the major problems in the drilling industry and affects the drilling components’ life and efficiency. To eliminate this undesirable vibration, one can design an active method-based robust controller that maintains the drill bit’s velocity at the required reference velocity. In this paper, a novel adaptive sliding mode (ASM) control scheme with two real-time auto-tuned gains is proposed to eliminate the stick–slip vibration in drill-string systems. In the analysis, Lyapunov analysis is performed to prove the finite-time convergence of the closed loop system of the proposed controller. The main goal of the new proposed strategy is to control the speed of the drill bit, ensuring a fast and accurate response and guaranteeing its robustness to external disturbances and variation in some parameters. The proposed controller performance was experimentally validated using hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) technique via real-time implementation in a OPAL-ART and dSpace systems. To show the effectiveness of this novel control schema, the hardware-in-the-loop validation results are compared with other well-known controllers from the literature. The results prove the effectiveness of the controller in eliminating torsional vibrations while maintaining an adequate response.