The Applied Mechanics Division has three departments:
 

These departments have experimental laboratories located in Rueil-Malmaison and IFP-Lyon.

	Oil & Gas Science and Technology - Revue de l'IFP THEMATIC DOSSIER: "Applied Mechanics for the Oil Industry" Download the articles free of charge: Part 1 / Part 2

Mechanical Engineering

The Mechanical Engineering Department applies its expertise in the field of mechanics to oil industry equipment and is responsible for the maintenance of IFP's experimental facilities. The Department's vocation is to analyze industrial needs and to design, study, produce, qualify, and maintain experimental and industrial equipment and installations.

The Department has expertise in the following area:

• industrial expertise in drilling and production;
• definition and mechanical design of equipment;
• development of technological solutions and models;
• dimensioning and optimization of mechanical structures;
• production, assembly, testing, and development of equipment and installations;

• maintenance of equipment and experimental installations;
• development of industry-specific design aid software;
• real-time analysis of malfunctions of complex systems.

This expertise is applied in a number of fields to help the Business Units achieve their strategic objectives.

• Drilling systems

- Drilling equipment
The drilling of wells with complex trajectories is an activity that requires continuous updating of the industry's equipment. In this context, the Department helps design directional drilling systems in "rotary" mode. The Department also studies the reliability of drill strings, which are subjected to repeated loads in severe environments (fatigue, corrosion, wear, etc.).

- Drilling risers
In the context of offshore drilling and the current work in very deep water (3,000 meters), the Department is involved in the development of new riser architectures suited to these environments. In particular, this involves a rapid connection system for drilling riser joints (Clip-Riser) and work to lighten structures (risers and high-pressure peripheral lines hooped with composite bands).

- Malfunction alarms
Controlling drilling can be an extremely complex operation: directional, horizontal, long-offset, or multiple-drain drilling. This makes drilling aid systems necessary. These are alarm or estimator systems that detect malfunctions (significant vibration of the drill string, excessive losses of head in the mud circuit, etc.) and allow corrective actions to be taken. They are based on careful analysis of measurements provided by sensors and interpreted by a real-time simulator.

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• Production equipment

- Measurements in wells
To improve their productivity, oil wells are fractured by injecting a high-pressure fluid from the surface. The SIMFRAC® logging probe, developed partly within the Department, uses measurements made inside the well during injection of the fluid to determine the orientation and direction of the fracture. The measurement is based on analysis of acoustic events generated by the rock under hydraulic stress.

- Structure of bottom-surface links for offshore work
The Department is involved in the development of bottom-surface links, structures that connect underwater equipment to floating production support systems. Examples of this include the use of composite materials for risers and flexible pipes.

• Experimental installations for upstream and downstream IFP Research Departments

The Mechanical Engineering Department helps develop installations for the experimental activities of IFP's Research Departments in the fields of Exploration-Production, Refining-Petrochemicals, and Engines-Fuels.

Solid Mechanics

The Solid Mechanics Department contributes to the research projects of the Business Units, providing its expertise and technical resources to analyze and characterize the mechanical behavior of the structures and materials used in the oil industry by means of modeling and testing. This work serves to define rules for the design and use of mechanical systems in realistic environments and under the effects of complex loads, to bring innovative mechanical concepts to market, thanks to a better understanding of their performance, and also to propose new technical solutions. The department also applies its expertise in rock and soil mechanics in the modeling of geological structures on various time and space scales.

The Department has expertise in the following areas:

• mechanics of materials: formulation and validation of mechanical constitutive laws for polymers, composites and steels, with allowance for fatigue, fracture mechanics, and homogenization techniques, especially in the context of New Energy Technologies (NET) for hydrogen transport;
   
• mechanics of structures and granular media: static and dynamic continuum mechanics, problems of instability due to buckling, mechanics of flexible pipes, numerical methods; development of dynamic models of granular media using discrete-element methods (GRAINS3D);
   
• experimental characterization: industrial-scale testing of structures and materials subject to mechanical and thermal stress; characterization of behavior under the effects of creep, fatigue, external pressure, temperature, etc.;
   
• mechanical reliability: theory and techniques of mechanical reliability of structures (FORM/SORM approximation methods, etc.) applied to the oil industry;
   
• Integrated interpretation of geoscience data relevant to the mechanical behavior of rocks and soils;
   
• constitutive laws of porous and/or fractured media and of faults;
   
• 3D thermo-hydro-mechanical modeling of geological structures.

This expertise is applied in a number of fields to help the Business Units achieve their strategic objectives.

"Kernite" test facility on the IFP-Lyon site

Flexion test bench / 500 T traction bench

For the Exploration-Production Business Unit, it contributes to the following themes:
 

• SURF (Subsea Umbilical, Risers and Flowlines)

The Department studies the mechanical behavior of mechanical systems used to link the deep offshore seabed to the surface, either for production or drilling (risers) or for platform mooring (mooring lines, tendons). The systems the Department is particularly interested in include flexible pipes, rigid reeled or composite systems, umbilicals, and various types of production systems (bundles). In this context, it carries out studies ranging from the development of constitutive laws for the materials composing these systems to experimental and numerical study of the behavior of complete structures in their environment. In particular, these studies focus on problems related to fatigue, instabilities due to buckling or creep, and the durability of these mechanical systems.

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• Hydrogen transport

The Department does work aimed at the use of new materials for the transport of hydrogen (hooped reservoirs, etc.). In this context, it considers problems of durability and fracture mechanics, in particular those arising from embrittlement by hydrogen.

• Deeply buried reservoirs

In the drilling of very deep reservoirs, the drillstrings are subjected to significant mechanical loads, leading, in particular, to problems of fatigue.
The Department therefore studies the mechanical behavior of drillstrings with a view to predicting service life under the effects of fatigue.
 
The Department also works on the detection of zones of fluid overpressure, in connection with modeling of the sedimentary basin, and on the mechanical behavior of very deep, highly compartmentalized reservoirs. Within this last theme area, research efforts are focused on understanding the mechanical behavior of faults, as a function of their permeability and their evolution on the production scale and also on the geological scale.

Finite-element modeling of a faulty structure in Abaqus software, using an approach by cohesive zone

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• Geological storage of sour gases

In the assessment of overburden integrity, work is being done on the characterization of the mechanical properties of rocks having very low permeability and the development of specific constitutive laws. These results are used in the geomechanical modeling of geological structures selected for the storage of sour gases (CO₂, H₂S) in order to assess overburden resistance and well integrity, in both the short term (stresses linked to injection) and the long term (several hundred years). Work is also being done on the mechanical behavior of faults and their reactivation following pressure variations induced by injection into the reservoir.
The impact of circulating acid fluids on the mechanical properties of reservoir rocks is also being analyzed and taken into account in numerical simulations coupling transport phenomena, chemical reactions, and mechanical deformations.
 
For this purpose, a great deal of work is being done on coupling between the variations of pressure, saturation, and temperature induced by production and mechanical deformation of the reservoir and surrounding formations.

Modeling the localization of deformations and zones of failure of a gritty reservoir with clayey heterogeneities

Finally, there are specific studies of the mechanical behavior of wells as they interact with rock formations, in the context of storage of sour gases that could chemically alter both the rock and the well materials, and also in the more general context of well abandonment.
 
For the Refining-Petrochemicals Business Unit, the Department contributes to characterizing and modeling the mechanical behavior of catalysts, in particular those used in catalyst moving-bed refining reactors. This work has led to the development of specific mechanical models ranging from the scale of the reactor to that of the catalyst support. The most recent studies are aimed at understanding the mechanisms of cracking of the lumps of alumina constituting the grains of catalyst, during the drying process, for example.

Fluid Mechanics

The Fluid Mechanics Department uses its experimental and computing skills to study complex flows in complex environment for mainly drilling and oil and gas production.
The Department's experimental facilities include high-resolution rheometers, specific laboratory set-ups, semi-industrial scale pilot loops. For numerical modeling, the Department develops specific in-house software or uses commercially available software. These resources contribute to a better understanding of physical phenomena and enable the development and validation of models and the simulation of complex industrial case studies. In the experimental laboratory, petroleum fluids are processed under conditions of pressure, flow rate, and temperature representative of field conditions.

The Department has expertise in the following areas:

• thermo-hydrodynamics of complex-rheology fluids: drilling mud, cement slurries, waxy crudes, suspensions of solid particles such as gas hydrates, heavy oils, etc.;
• multiphase flow in pipes and in equipment such as pumps and separators;
• fluid-structure interactions concerning the effect of marine currents, waves, on subsea umbilicals, risers and flowline linking seabed installations to the surface.

This expertise is applied in a number of fields to help the Business Units achieve their strategic objectives.

• Drilling and production fluids

Complex fluid flows in annular geometries are studied with a view to improving drilling conditions (well cleaning, bottomhole pressure) and well cementing Drilling fluids and cement slurries are mixtures of various elements, such as solid powders or polymers, and their flow properties are extremely varied (yield stress, shear thinning, aging, etc.).
For many crude oils, because their internal microstructure may be complex, their flow is not so easy to handle. The presence of solid particles, such as gas hydrates, paraffin crystals, or droplets forming an emulsion, has a significant impact on hydrodynamic conditions and eventually on production.
The studies conducted by the Department help to optimize fluid treatments and transport conditions and to develop models for predicting pressure drops and flow regimes. The models take into account the complex rheologies of the fluids, the operating conditions (specific geometry of the drilling annulus, displacement of a fluid by another fluid, specific environment such as offshore, etc.), as well as thermal and thermodynamic effects. These are validated on experimental installations and actual field data.

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• Offshore structures and bottom-surface links

Under the action of marine currents and waves, floating support systems and their subsea umbilicals, risers and flowlines exhibit complex dynamic behavior. The work consists in developing models to simulate the interaction between fluids and structures with a view to the design and qualification of new structural concepts. In particular, these studies deal with V.I.V. or "vortex induced vibrations" (alternating shedding of trailing vortexes), which can lead to fatigue damage to drilling and production risers. The results are incorporated in the DEEPLINES™ code and in modules such as DEEPVIV and DEEPFLOW.

• Multiphase production

The objective of multiphase flow studies is to improve the design, engineering and operation of hydrocarbon production and transport installations, from the well to the processing stage. Experimental and numerical studies are conducted on flows in network production installations, such as pipes, pumps, flow meters, and separators. Other studies concern modeling the composition of steady-state and transient flows of a multiphase fluid, taking into account the hydrodynamic behavior, the thermodynamic evolution, and thermal exchanges between the fluid and its environment. The developments are integrated in the R2P (Reservoir to Process) platform based on the INDISS tool, using the CAPE-OPEN standard, which has an open, modular computer architecture.