Design and analysis of an intelligent drill pipe's thread joint

Intelligent drill pipe is one of the main research directions in the current oil drilling and production field due to its technical advantages like drilling equipment status monitoring, fault diagnosis, information exchange, intelligent regulation, and on-demand maintenance in drilling tools and downhole geological information in real-time during the oil drilling and production process. In this paper, the mechanical structure of a new type of drill pipe joint is developed for the 5.5-inch intelligent drill pipe based on magnetic coupling communication, which achieves precise positioning, alignment, fixation, and communication of the magnetic core group. Based on ANSYS/Workbench finite element analysis software, the static analysis on the mechanical structure of drill pipe joint was conducted to analyse the static characteristics of intelligent drill pipe joints under five load conditions (including 350T tension, 96 kN.m torque, 12°/30 m bending, and their combinations). The results indicated that the maximum equivalent stress value was about 313.1 MPa, which is lower than the tensile strength and yield strength of S135 steel and meets the strength requirements. This work provides hardware support for the intelligent drill pipe system.