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Steerable motor assemblies or PDMs

The most important advancements in trajectory control are the steerable motor assemblies, which
contain PDMs with bent subs or bent housing. The PDM is based on the Moineau principle. The first
commercial PDM was introduced to the petroleum industry in the late 1960s. Since then, PDM use
has been accelerated greatly for directional-drilling applications. Steerable motor assemblies are
versatile and are used in all sections of directional wells, from kicking off and building angle to drilling
tangent sections and providing accurate trajectory control. Among the PDM assemblies, the most
commonly used deviation tool today is the bent-housing mud motor.

The bent sub and bent housing use bit tilt (misalignment of bit face away from the drillstring axis)
and bit side force to change the hole direction and inclination. Bent housing is more effective than
the bent sub because of a shorter bit-to-bend distance, which reduces the bit offset and creates a
higher build rate for a given bend size. A shorter bit-to-bend distance also reduces the moment arm,
which, in turn, reduces the bending stress at the bend. As a result, the bent-housing PDM is easier to
orient and allows for a long rotation period. Larger hole sizes (22 to 26 in.) are the only application
for a bent sub. The requirement for bent subs is obsolete in most applications, particularly with the
introduction of the adjustable bent housing.

Before the personal computer become widely available, the simple “three-point curvature”
calculation was used to predict the build rates of the motor assemblies as

RTENOTITLE....................(1)

in which,

rb = build rate in degrees/100 ft,

θ = bend angle in degrees,

L1 = distance from the first contact point (bit) to the second (bend) in ft,

L2 = distance from the second contact point to the third (motor top stabilizer) in ft.

For more-accurate results, a BHA-analysis program is often used to calculate the build/drop/turn
rates of the motor assemblies. Fig. 1 shows the expected Dogleg Severity (DLS) and the bit side forces
for a two-stabilizer motor assembly