Dynamic Surface Control for the Reduction of Torsional Vibrations in a Scaled Experimental Drillstring Setup

The Torsional oscillations that occur during drilling are detrimental to the life of the drill string and reduce the rate of penetration of the operation. To study the dynamics of drill string and evaluate the controller performance scaled test rigs for drilling are used to circumvent the problem of accessibility to reliable downhole information in a real drill string. In this work a dynamic sliding surface controller is implemented for a scaled drilling test rig. The experimental results show that the controller is able to reduce both low frequency and high frequency torsional oscillations.