SPE/IADC-173037-MS

Recent Advances in Soft Torque Rotary Systems

Sicco Dwars, Shell

Copyright 2015, SPE/IADC Drilling Conference and Exhibition

This paper was prepared for presentation at the SPE/IADC Drilling Conference and Exhibition held in London, United Kingdom, 17–19 March 2015.

This paper was selected for presentation by an SPE/IADC program committee following review of information contained in an abstract submitted by the author(s).
Contents of the paper have not been reviewed by the Society of Petroleum Engineers or the International Association of Drilling Contractors and are subject to
correction by the author(s). The material does not necessarily reflect any position of the Society of Petroleum Engineers or the International Association of Drilling
Contractors, its officers, or members. Electronic reproduction, distribution, or storage of any part of this paper without the written consent of the Society of Petroleum
Engineers or the International Association of Drilling Contractors is prohibited. Permission to reproduce in print is restricted to an abstract of not more than 300 words;
illustrations may not be copied. The abstract must contain conspicuous acknowledgment of SPE/IADC copyright.

Abstract
Many rigs have STRS, the Soft Torque Rotary System, also known in the drilling industry as SoftSpeed,
EPST or RevIT. STRS expands the stick-slip free drilling envelope. Weight on bit can go up, RPM can
go down. Rate of penetration goes up. Whenever STRS is in use, the frequency of tripping a drill string
out and back into the hole reduces. That’s because it reduces the likelihood of prematurely worn bits, for
twist offs, back offs or for damaged down hole tools. From the vast amount of operational data collected
by mandatory 24/7 high speed top drive torque and speed recorders, we learnt that the now mature
technology could still be further improved. This paper outlines the Z-Torque approach, a novel Soft-
Torque controller that expands stick-slip free operating envelopes and greatly simplifies tool operation.
Author of this paper is an electronics engineer, approaching the stick-slip challenge from an unusual
perspective: aim to cure stick-slip vibrations with the same tools and tricks as traditionally used in high
frequency printed circuit board design, in telephone lines, TV antenna coax cables, fiber optics, in seismic,
and the likes.

Background
Classic SoftTorque conceptually models a drillstring as a second order inertia-stiffness system. That
makes it a resonant system, a torsional pendulum, a system with an eigenfrequency. By electronically
imposing stiffness, through a tweak in the top drive speed controller, and by utilizing the top drive inertia,
the same resonant frequency for the drillstring system is copied to the top drive system. This then enables
damping, critical damping, to be also added electronically to the topdrive stiffness-inertia system. That
damping enables the dissipation, the ‘sucking out’ of the energy that would otherwise allow the amplitude
of the drill string vibration to grow into, and then sustain in stick-slip vibrations.

Drivers for improvement

Classic SoftTorque serves industry well. However, there is scope for improvement:
1. The system needs constant re-tuning against the actual drillstring length. This is an error prone and
labor intense process. Classic SoftTorque asks the driller to enter different Kf (stiffness) and Cf
(damping) values for every N stands of drill pipe added. Various attempts are made to let
SoftTorque systems autotune themselves, for example by analyzing periodicity in torque and speed
2 SPE/IADC-173037-MS

signals and sometimes by also adding some extra broadband excitation energy to the topdrive
output. We’re undecided still if these autotune systems can ever outperform the manual process.
2. Practical drill strings show not just one eigenfrequency. The lumped mass, lumped stiffness model
that reduces the drillstring into one equivalent drillstring stiffness and one equivalent BHA inertia
appears inaccurate.
3. The reduced model takes no notion of propagation time delay. Modeling the drill pipe as only
stiffness with no time delay is inaccurate: we know that for 3 km drill pipe, it takes one second
before the topdrive notices torque variations at the BHA, and another second before a corrective
torque from the topdrive can actually reach the BHA. Those 1⫹1⫽2 seconds are not small beer.
The stick-slip that we aim to mitigate manifests in the 2-10 seconds range. Always running several
seconds after the facts is, for a vibrations mitigating system, far from perfect.
4. Feedback from the field globally is that SoftTorque technology performs well with 4 1/2 to 6 5/8
inch drill pipe and for strings of 1500 to 4500 meters length, but not quite as good outside of that
envelope. Economic drivers for land operations are to use slimmer holes, so narrower drill pipe.
In deepwater operations, deeper waters and extreme horizontal reach force us to address the
⬎⬎4500 meter challenges.
This leads us to rethink the fundamentals, and to look at the stick-slip vibration problem from a
different perspective: the waveguide perspective. Drill strings can be modeled as waveguides, aka
transmission lines. Waveguide systems are defined as strings of sections each defined by two basic
characteristic properties: end to end wave propagation time, and impedance. Waveguide theory tells us
that the best way to avoid standing waves is to eliminate wave reflection points. The premises for the next
generation SoftTorque is that we leave the BHA and the bit-formation interaction for what they are:
something too many seconds away from the top drive. Instead we assume drill pipe is homogeneous,
hanging more or less free in casing, with some minor damping distributed along the way. And we can
assume that drill pipe is quite long, multiple ‘seconds’ long. So we really only need to look at the drill
pipe to top drive interface. At that boundary point we persuade any wave of any frequency that travels
towards the top drive to ‘think’ that there’s more of the same drill pipe above surface. So make it think
that there is no boundary condition. As if the drill pipe extends above surface, all the way to the moon.
The wave thus has no other option than to travel on, onto that virtual pipe extension above the rig. Nothing
bounces back in the hole. Active impedance matching is the magic word for that. A top drive that acts like
extended pipe for that wave does this trick. And can be realized. We call it Z-Torque.
A review of the past fifty years of work on drillstring dynamics models and the proposed and accepted
vibration mitigation applications within the drilling industry is presented in reference [1] and the
references cited therein. Challenging most of that conventional wisdom and those practices, we now
boldly stated the following:

‘Forget the BHA. Forget the bit-rock interaction. Imagine the drillstring is mainly drill pipe. Drill pipe is for its longest
part, the top part, spinning more or less friction free in casing. Don’t tune the topdrive to any particular frequency.
Instead let it have and let it show a wide band with fixed output impedance. A frequency independent output impedance.
Let that impedance be exactly the same as the characteristic impedance of the connected drill pipe. Because if these
impedances match, then any perturbation, of linear or non-linear origin, coming from anywhere along the string,
travelling towards the top drive, at any frequency, will not reflect back. If a wave cannot bounce at the top drive, then
the entire wave energy will be taken out of the drill string.’

Actually, this approach was hinted at already 25 years ago. Reference [2] and early SoftTorque patents
mention the concept of drill pipe characteristic impedance, and the idea of reducing wave reflection by
introducing drive output impedance. Also Reference [3] mentions elimination of a wave reflection point
as the medicine against stick-slip. However, all implementations have lead to tuned topdrive or rotary
table systems, tuned to one particular frequency, with that frequency being a function of observed or
SPE/IADC-173037-MS 3

predicted stick-slip periods. Tuned against the length of drill pipe and the inertia of the BHA, with that
tuning always using at least some of the top drive inertia as a key tuning parameter. None of the prior art
aims to fully match the impedance at any frequency in an as wide as practical band, at any time, and thus
irrespective of the length of the string. In prior art, it is deemed adequate already to only introduce some
resistive output impedance but not to fully match so that reflection coefficients are zero for many
frequencies, at the same time. Consequently, it is not uncommon that these systems cure stick-slip at the
first string mode, but as a byproduct give back more violent new vibrations at overtones of the
fundamental string frequency.
Stop waves from bouncing back in the hole, by concept, most effectively eliminates torsional vibrations
in the stick-slip prone frequency band. From the top drill pipe’s perspective, the ultimate trick is to make
a top drive behave just like extra, virtually extended, equivalent drill pipe above the rig, to the moon. And
do that only in the relevant frequency band. We think we can make modern top drives act just like that.
And in doing that, as a bonus, drop the troublesome STRS tuning work processes.

From coax cables to drill strings

When electronics engineers design printed circuit boards, or connect antennas to radios, their mission is
to carefully match the characteristic impedance of any transmission line to the input and output impedance
of the connected circuits at both ends of that transmission medium. If the impedances do not match, then
high frequency signals will bounce back and forth within the medium and standing waves will emerge.
The transmission line then no longer acts as pure unidirectional signal or energy conductor. And it
certainly fails to act as a frequency neutral conductor: depending on the length of the line, a distinct set
of frequencies is filtered whereas other frequencies appear amplified. A to be transmitted signal injected
at one end shows up distorted at the receiving end. Bandwidth is compromised. Circuits at both ends, and
also the cable itself may fail catastrophically because energy in the form of standing waves can now
accumulate inside the line.
Volts and amps in electronics are RPM and torque in the mechanical domain. Via a transmission
channel these ‘across’ and ‘through’ variables together transport energy in between two locations. A
drillstring is such a channel in the mechanical domain. At one end, the top drive couples power into the
string, and at the other end the bit that’s cutting, milling and crushing rock dissipates that energy and thus
acts as a load on the string. When drilling, the ideal situation is that energy flows unidirectional from top
drive to bit, while no energy flows back from bit to surface. The latter is a stretched target. A 50% solution
however is quite perfect already: matched impedance only at surface guarantees that energy flowing from
down hole to surface is neutralized at surface. Standing waves thus cannot materialize because they need
partially reflecting boundary conditions at both ends of the string.
The product of the ‘across’ and ‘through’ variable is power in Watts, the quotient is resistance,
impedance, admittance, conductance, aka damping – with the confusing caveat that some terms are
reciprocal. But they’re all the same in essence. The analogies go further. Stiffness maps to inductance.
Inertia maps to capacitance.
Electronics engineers only match impedances if the length of the transmission line is substantial.
Substantial here means wave lengths in meters approaches (by order of magnitude) line lengths in meters.
So wave propagation speed matters. In electronics, that speed is roughly the speed of light. In drilling, a
torsional wave travels much slower, some 3 km/s. If we calculate the wave lengths and look at typical
stick-slip frequencies, then we do end up in the same regime. The lowest standing wave frequency that
fits in 3000 meters of drill pipe, with one end open, and the other end fixed, is 4 times 3000 m / 3 km/s,
and that’s 4 seconds: well within the 0.1 to 0.5 Hz frequency band where stick-slip typically manifests.
With Z-Torque, we steal the electronics engineering design concepts and apply them to the top drive
and drillstring.
4 SPE/IADC-173037-MS

Figure 1 summarizes waveguide textbook theory. Bad engineering practice is to omit a Zsource series
resistor. Although not smart from an overall energy efficiency perspective, the ‘good practice’ passive
circuit is the preferred method. Only that circuit stops waves from bouncing back and forth within the
transmission line. Only that method ensures distortion free unidirectional flow of energy or signals. With
that, and only with that, standing waves cannot exist, and only with that matched Zsource the actual length
of the line becomes irrelevant.

Figure 1—Waveguides – an electronics engineer’s perspective.

A Zsource series resistor however wastes a lot of the source energy into heat. For the same line voltage
we will now need a higher voltage source to start with. How much higher depends on the ratio Zload to
Zsource. We will waste a lot of the energy in Zsource in order to deliver the same power to Zsource as we did
before in the ‘bad practice’ scheme. That’s not good if it’s a high power system and if there’s no sink for
that heat. The workaround against wasting energy by heat generation in Zsource is active impedance
matching. An electronic circuit then mimics the behavior of the passive Zsource resistor. It simply measures
the line terminal current, and adjust the terminal voltage to whatever it takes to meet the criterion that Vout
⫽ Vset - Zsource * I.
In figure 2 we map this solution on a top drive, drillstring and rock cutting bit system. Look at the
conventional topdrive as if it is the ‘bad practice’ voltage source in figure 1. The drillstring is the
transmission line, and the bit is the load. How many RPM/Nm this bit represents as dissipating load we
cannot really tell.
SPE/IADC-173037-MS 5

Figure 2—Drill string as a waveguide.

It will for sure depend on the weight on bit. And it could be zero with the bit off bottom. Actually, this
load is highly non-linear, with a nasty Stribeck curve that tends to amplify and maintain stick-slip once
a bit comes to occasional standstills. This makes it shear impossible to aim for matched impedance at the
drillstring-bit-rock interface. Another complication is the BHA. BHA tubulars have very different
characteristic impedances than drill pipe. A jump in impedance at any point in a transmission line is a
point where wave energy splits into a reflected and a transmitted part. But the total energy remains, and
nothing dissipates into heat. BHA’s typically are various sections with different impedances: collars,
heavy wall drill pipe, stabilizers, jars and rotary steerable sections. BHAs therefore tend to chop wave
fronts into multiple smaller wave fronts, with different frequencies, but do all of that without dissipating
energy.
There’s one thing we can say and that is that above the BHA, the tubular is homogeneous and long.
Mapping that back to electronics, then we start at surface with a decent coax cable, homogeneous and
long. After a few kilometers, we see that coax coupled poorly to coax of different impedance, and then
some 100 meters deeper again a jump in impedance, with finally the bit and thus the payload. But again,
the good thing is that we have a long and homogenous transmission line to start with, and we’re aiming
to combat stick-slip – which shows as very low frequency vibrations. From a standing waves perspective,
low frequencies can only exist in the system if the system has both a significant line length and good
reflection points at both ends. The lowest end, where drill pipe meets BHA and a bit eventually, we cannot
really influence. At the other end, at surface where pipe meets its driving power supply, we can do
something. If we add a series resistor then we kill reflections. If we kill reflections, then waves no longer
‘stand’. Literally adding a series resistor is in the mechanical domain equivalent to adding a viscous
damper in series with the saver sub or motor drive shaft. On a 500 kW top drive, it would dissipate up
to 500 kW, or even more, and the motor nameplate power rating would need to be doubled at least. That’s
not practical. Luckily electronics engineering gave us active impedance matching as a workaround:
measure the save sub torque, multiply that with the drill pipe characteristic impedance Z, and instanta-
neously subtract that product from the setpoint speed. Do not do that for DC, only for AC (say AC is
⬎⬎0.02 Hz, DC is about 1 minute time scales or more).
6 SPE/IADC-173037-MS

Load curves, and electric circuits for such a top drive would change as per Figure 3 below.

Figure 3—Load curves and drive circuits for a conventional stiff (left) and for a simplified Z-Torque top drive.

And that’s the last thing that a driller wants. For two good reasons: a) this is way too ‘soft’. And b)
most of the topdrive power will be burnt into heat by a viscous damper right underneath the saver sub –
because that’s where R must reside.
The driller just wants his setpoint to be realized as saver sub speed. He is fine though if that lasts say
30 seconds while slowly ramping up the actual top drive speed. With the sloped plot in figure 3 above,
the top drive would simply stall. It stalls quite likely already with the bit off bottom because accumulated
over miles, there is quite some friction along the hole. So we must compromise. The compromise is that
on a timescale of 10⫹ seconds we return back to the original ‘stiff’ curve. But on the time scale of 1-10
seconds, so in the stick-slip band, we let the top drive only show to drill pipe the matched impedance
curve.
If the conditions in the hole are such that at the driller setpoint, the static torque happens to be Tx, then
the curve that keeps everyone happy is as in figure 4 below.
SPE/IADC-173037-MS 7

Figure 4 —Modified loading curve: a slow loop integrator eventually makes the actual speed V equal to the setpoint speed Vset.

It is the task of a slow loop integrator loop in Z-Torque to eventually reach the settling point (Tx,
RPMset). That’s the controller’s long term objective, which now comes as a second priority. In the short
run, the first objective is to realize output impedance, i.e. to maintain the slope. When plotting the realized
drive output impedance against frequency, the targeted plot will look as in figure 5. Phase ideally is zero
degrees from frequencies zero to infinity, but if it is plus or minus 90 degrees outside of the band of 0.1
to 1 Hz, then that’s tolerable.

Figure 5—Aspired Z-Torque top drive source impedance.

Note this is quite different from the black bell shape source impedance curve as in classic SoftTorque,
as in figure 6.
8 SPE/IADC-173037-MS

Figure 6 —Classic SoftTorque topdrive output impedance.

What to do with the top drive inertia

Figures above showed a grayed out capacitor. In mechanical terms, this represents the top drive mass
moment of inertia. A capacitor in parallel with a perfect voltage source has no impact really. No impact
in the sense that the capacitor is invisible for a connected load. Likewise, drill pipe cannot see top drive
inertia when the top drive has an extreme stiff speed controller, as in Figure 3 on the left. In classic
SoftTorque, inertia C does show up for the drill pipe. Hence the bell shaped curves. In Z-Torque, we target
frequency independent and zero phase source impedances. The inertia shall thus be invisible for the drill
pipe. We achieve that with active impedance matching. We simply let the topdrive keep its stiff speed
controller as before, so that it dictates a speed X. That speed X however will no longer be the driller’s
setpoint: instead we will now subtract Z * Tsaversub.
Only hurdle left now is to obtain a clean and instantaneous saver sub torque signal. Motor torque is the
sum of Tsaversub and whatever torque is needed for altering the top drive rotational speed. Typically we
get measured motor torque from a motor drive circuit, and we can estimate acceleration by differentiating
the top drive RPM. So if we know the inertia, we can compute on the fly what the actual drill pipe to top
drive interface torque is. Note that this is a different solution as PID controller D term inertia compen-
sation methods as mentioned e.g. in [3]. In Z-Torque, we first effectively short circuit the inertia so that
it is neutralized. Only reason we need to know the inertia value is that if it accelerates, and if we do not
have a saver sub torque sensor (as e.g. a NOV StringSense® instrumented IBOP, a 3PS/Pason wireless
instrumented saver sub), that, just to save money on or avoid hassle with those instruments, we like to get
saver sub torque (partly) via a ‘soft sensor’.
How to reach the drillers speed setpoint, eventually
One more puzzle to solve now, and that’s the slow loop integrator in Figure 4. In Z-Torque, in the short
run, we rank the priority of this task below the priority of realizing fixed output impedance. Only in the
long run, on timescales of say 10 seconds and above, we adjust the ‘setpoint’ voltage to whatever it takes
to eventually make the top drive speed equal to the setpoint as dialed by the driller. A simple
integrator-only outer shell control loop does the job. The net effect is a transitioning back to stiff behavior
at very low frequencies. One might opt to reduce this timescale for shorter drill strings. This brings a faster
SPE/IADC-173037-MS 9

reaction to manual changes in speed setpoint and to changes in the load at the bit. On the other hand, doing
that may not be wise as it defeats the urgent call for simplicity for the end user, i.e. for the driller in his
doghouse.

The loop in the loop in the loop, in a loop

So far the essentials of the impedance matching top drive controllers. These should act in the 0.1 to 2 Hz
frequency band, the stick-slip prone band. The impedance matching torque feedback loop acts on a ⬎⫽
0.1 Hz time scale typically. It also acts below that frequency, but there it is overruled by the outer loop.
For the upper end of the impedance matching regime, the criteria is the faster the better, because the
slower it is, the more of a wave front will have bounced back into the hole due to an initially mismatched
impedance. Drill pipe torsional waves travel at about 3 km/s, so being 0.1 second late means that 300 wave
meters have bounced back already into the hole, heading back towards the BHA and bit. Then there’s no
way for the topdrive to still catch back that energy. No way other than waiting until it bounces back again
after being chopped at the drill pipe to BHA interface, chopped further within the BHA, and chopped at
the bit-formation interface. Some think that this is all predictable so that say 2-3 seconds later we would
exactly know the anti-wave needed to kill also this fast transient when it’s arriving again back at surface.
We are skeptical if that’s really feasible beyond the point of possibly injecting more ‘wrong’ energy in
error – so doing more harm than good. Backed by the assumption that wave front sharpness is lost anyhow
via both mud-string viscous damping, internal steel damping and by the many tool joints that interconnect
drill pipe singles, we take a pragmatic approach: forget that wave front that we initially failed to catch.
It will get chopped and dampened anyhow. Intrinsic damping will do the rest for these high frequency
remainders of broadband wave fronts.
Luckily the stick-slip initiated torque/speed waves are of moderate frequencies, having fundamental
wavelengths of 2 to 4 times the drillstring (wave)length, which makes the 300 meters wave front that
‘bounced back’ already before we could ‘catch’ it, tolerable again. After all, these waves aren’t unit-step
tsunamis.
Another loop, fully independent of the impedance matching loop, is the controller that realizes the stiff
speed controller. That’s the unity gain block drawn in figure 1 as op-amp buffers. This in our case is a
VFD, a motor, an encoder, and a PID controller that maintains speed. These loops are again one level
deeper in the hierarchy. Finally, deep in the VFD, there’s the torque controller. It aims to have (to sink
or source) a motor air gap torque as commanded by the speed controller output. It’s a feedback loop
operating in the sub milliseconds range.
The overall scheme therefore is this set of nested controllers:
10 SPE/IADC-173037-MS

Figure 7—The complete Z-Torque controller: four nested loops, with four 4 different cutoff frequencies, with 4 dedicated control
objectives.

Stability analysis of such a system, either for an unloaded topdrive, or for an arbitrary drillstring, with
the bit either on or off bottom is subject of ongoing work. In general we can state that by keeping the
transition frequencies of all four loops far apart, we’re good. Practical implementations do require good
encoder systems. Torque feedback signals can appear extreme noisy – although mostly that’s due to
aliasing and undersampling. Noise in torque calls for low pass filtering, which in turn reduces the upper
frequency where impedance will still be matched. Too many filters with accumulated phase shifts easily
lead to hitting a Nyquist’s criterion for open loops in the Z and in the inner RPM controller. A too low
P gain in the speed controller also deteriorates performance. A too high gain blows up encoder noise.
Solutions are at hand to solve these practicalities: digital filtering, line by line encoder signal evaluation,
encoder line by line acceleration sensing, and most importantly: no (digital) communication busses and
protocols (Profibus, FieldBus, CAN, or EtherCAT) that introduce time delay (dead time) within the
(inner) control loops.
Practical Implementations
A drillstring scale model was realized to test the novel approach. The model scales a 6 km drillstring to
6 meters. But it scales without scaling time behavior. It thus still takes 2 seconds for perturbations to travel
from topdrive to bit and vice versa. A Kollmorgen AKD-11 motor acts as topdrive. An optional torque
sensor provides ‘saver sub’ torque at the motor-string interface point. The setup thus has speed and torque
sensing capabilities. The VFD, a Kollmorgen AKD drive, is programmed as stiff speed controller. That
makes it equivalent to the unity gain block drawn as the unity gain op-amp buffer circuits in figure 1. The
impedance matching controller is implemented in LabView FPGA real-time. It also runs algorithms for
automatically sensing the connected (top of the) load impedance so that the actual torque and speed
scaling becomes irrelevant. The trick here is to observe the effect of a sudden setpoint step of X RPM.
This must materialize, for as long as nothing has bounced back yet, as exactly X/2 actual top drive speed.
If not then the impedance that we’re actively creating is either too low or too high. So we can set the
impedance value Zsource automatically. Provided we have a reasonable length, say ⬎1500 meter, of
homogenous drill pipe as top section of the drill string.
Evidenced by the video, these scale model experiments confirmed the hands-off, tuning-free, stick-slip
mitigation capabilities.
SPE/IADC-173037-MS 11

Real-time drillstring simulators were realized in LabView FPGA systems. These simulators mimic
drillstring waveguide behavior. They take saver sub speed as analog input, and return as analog output the
torque that the simulated drillstring would throw back at the saver sub. The simulator has been used on
back-to-back motor test-bench setups to verify in the workshops of top drive makers that Z-Torque
controllers as implemented are robust, fast enough, and do realize inertia corrected mechanical output
impedance at the air gap of the load simulating motor.
Modern VFDs offer the option to program their speed controllers in the vendor neutral IEC 61131
standard. On a small scale unit with back-to-back ABB ACS880 demo kit drives, such a controller was
realized as prototype. The promise is that this VFD embedded software can be ported easily to any IEC
61131 compliant state of the art VFD.
Also Siemens MasterDrive and the more recent Sinamics/Simotion S-120 VFDs were recently
converted into Z-Torque systems, using free function blocks and other user programmable features within
these drives. These fully VFD embedded Z-Torque implantations show the best performance with respect
to inertia correction capability, sensed motor torque signal noise, saver sub torque signal reproduction, and
thus upper frequency limit for matched impedance.
First field deployments are ongoing in the Netherlands and in Oman, with partners Bentec and
ElectroProject. While drilling stick-slip mitigation performance results are now available and being
evaluated.
Mind stretcher
There’s a fundamental question for the reader: If we have fully impedance matched top drives, would it
be possible to still outperform them on stick-slip mitigation effectiveness? Stated differently: would it be
possible that the wave energy that’s bouncing up and down a drillstring gets even further reduced, with
less efficient reflection elimination? Or: Would it be possible to shoot in more energy, more than what’s
needed to immediately chase the reflected wave with an anti wave, so that we eventually kill the torsional
string vibrations even better? Waveguide theory learns that the fundamental answer the three questions is
no.
By-products enabled by Z-Torque
Kf Cf tuning as required with classic SoftTorque is eliminated with Z-Torque. Z-Torque needs only one
‘tuning’ parameter and that is the drill pipe impedance. That parameter is independent of string length.
And it is also independent of BHA, bit, mud or formation. In fact, proper matching of output impedance
to drill pipe impedance can easily be automated by observing the short term immediate response to any
change in top drive speed setpoint. Without knowing the exact speed or torque scaling, a Z-Torque system
can match impedances via a simple iterative successive approximating process, using the simple rule that
any full step in setpoint RPM should initially show as exactly half a RPM step in saver sub rotation speed.
Benefits of the new controller reach beyond its prime purpose of avoiding and curing stick-slip
vibrations. Matched impedance topdrives enable lighter drill strings. Lighter drill strings enable lighter
rigs. Conventional high-weight high-inertia BHA designs are often motivated by their assumed capability
to reduce stick-slip tendency. That drives to higher BHA inertia, meaning heavier BHA’s, meaning
heavier rigs. That driver is eliminated by Z-Torque. Bits, expensive bits, are selected for their alleged
ability to reduce the likelihood of stick-slip occurrence. Likewise, it’s common practice in the industry to
treat drilling mud with costly additives that lubricate better, thus allegedly reduce sticking, and thus would
reduce stick-slip. With stick-slip finally and fully eliminated at the root, those drivers all change or
disappear.
Another by product is drillstring imaging. Just as in seismic, in echography or in fiber optic sensor
reflectometry, a space domain drill string image will show up when adding a tiny bit of broadband noise
to the speed setpoint, and cross correlating that noise signal to the returning pipe torque. A prerequisite
12 SPE/IADC-173037-MS

for sharp cross correlation function images is frequency independent matched impedance at surface. The
cross correlation function will also nicely show how good or bad the top drive source impedance is
matched to the top drill pipes.
Data transmission from surface to BHA via torque and speed pulses gets easier when echoed pulses will
not bounce back again at surface. This creates a potential low cost alternative to mud pulse telemetry:
imposed top drive speed fluctuations can be picked up in the BHA as meaningful telemetry data.
Similarly, data can be communicated distortion free from BHA to surface by ‘talking speed/torque’.
Finally, we see potential for novel rotary steering methods and systems. With impedance matched top
drive and drill pipe, the BHA and bit speed can be controlled and thus dictated more precisely, and more
direct. BHA and bit speed can be controlled down to the point where RPM fluctuations can be dictated
within each BHA revolution. With that, the distribution of average orientation residence time of a bent
sub, mud motor and bit assembly can be tweaked, with as end result a steer in a direction as dictated by
corresponding top drive speed modulations. This ‘wobble steering’ method has been attempted before, but
so far with little success due to the lack of matched impedance at surface.
Conclusions
The SoftTorque journey continues. Matched impedance topdrives can be realized with modern electron-
ics. Already 30 years ago, the frequency independent impedance matched topdrive could have been
realized. Somehow that never happened. The elegance of the now proposed method and system somehow
was overlooked, possibly by staring blind on, and by the chasing of characteristic frequencies that always
do show up as stick-slip frequencies. That frequency however is a symptom of, not the root cause of
stick-slip while drilling. So now we catch up. We catch the waves.
Modeling, simulation and lab scale models confirmed that the window for stick-slip free drilling can
be substantially widened. RPM can go lower, WOB goes higher. Much higher. Or we can opt to keep these
where they are, but use slimmer drill pipe, or a lower weight BHA. Either way, we’ve pushed the limits
for economically drilling extreme holes, in ever more challenging places and formations.

Glossary of terms
AC: Alternating Current – or more generically: any physical quantity swinging at a frequency
greater than zero
BHA: Bottom Hole Assembly – the lower part of a drillstring
FPGA: Field Programmable Gate Array – a programmable logic/arithmetic computer chip
IBOP: Internal Blowout Preventer – a pressure containment safety valve in a top drive system
ROP: Rate of Penetration – distance drilled per time period
RPM: Revolutions per Minute – the rotational speed of a top drive, drillstring or bit
VFD: Variable Frequency Drive – power electronics cabinet that drives an electric AC motor
WOB: Weight on Bit – force on formation exercised by a drilling bit

References
1. DSCC2014-6147, Drillstring Vibration Observation, Modeling and Prevention in the Oil and Gas
Industry, Roman J. Shor, Mitch Pryor, Eric van Oort, The University of Texas at Austin.
2. SPE 18049, Torque Feedback Used to Cure Stick-Slip motion, G.W. Halsey, A. Kyllingstad and
A. Kylling, Rogaland Research Inst.
3. SPE/IADC 119660, A New Stick-Slip Prevention Systems, A. Kyllingstad, P.J. Nessjoen, NOV.