ANALYTICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON PDC DRILL BITS QUALITY

Overview & Synopsis

Innovating materials, sintering process and design recently developed to improve drill bits hardness and fracture toughness also require in parallel a new strategy in quality measurement. According to the destructive mode of drag bits, quality can be deffined by two important parameters: materials wear rates and excavation performances. In the case of measuring wear rates, the well-known Archard's model has been successfully used in several works to describe PDC/rock sliding contact behavior [2]. The cutting efficiency evolution is closely linked to the wear flat formation during friction and is initially determined by the PDC active area (i.e. depth of cut). The aim of this paper is to propose a quality criterion Q for a given PDC cutter which gathers different parameters already used in drilling mechanism analysis.