Research status and development trend on wear of impregnated diamond bits

Abstract

Significance Impregnated diamond bits (IDBs) have been widely used in various hard rock drilling activities, especially deep drilling. Drilling process with IDBs relies on diamond edge wrapped by metal matrices to break the rock formation, which means the wear pattern of the diamond bit reflects the interaction between bits and rock, as well as the existence form of broken particles, which directly determine the drilling efficiency and service life of the drilling tools. But up to now there have not been so much in-depth study on its wear mechanism and analysing method in geological drilling. Progress and Analysis Therefore, this paper reviews the research literature on IDBs wear in the field of geological drilling, summarizes the abnormal bit wear problem according to engineering project experineces and industrial standards. Firstly, based on the experiences of geological drilling activities and industry standards, different types of abnormal bit wear of drill bits were summarized. Then, the evaluation methods of drill bit wear were introduced from the aspects of wear images and drilling signals. The wear mechanism and influencing factors of the drill bit in the drilling process were sorted out from three aspects: The overall drill bit, diamond, and metal matrix. In addition, mainstream methods of controlling drill bit wear performance were listed, and the research progress of wear analysis equations was introduced, besides, how machine learning methods can assist in the study of drill bit wear was discussed. Conclusion and Prospect Thus, IDBs have great potentials in deep hard rock drilling, and their wear performance is the key influnencing the whole drilling activity. To this end, research directions such as artificial intelligence assisting data analysis, microscale computational simulation, additive manufacturing, and material processing modification were analyzed and discussed, aiming to explore advanced methods for monitoring, analyzing, and regulating the wear of diamond drill bits, so as to meet the needs of remote monitoring and controlling in drilling activities such as geological deep drilling and extraterrestrial drilling.

Keywords

• impregnated diamond bit
• rock fracturing
• bit wear
• wear mechanism
• wear evaluation
• machine learning