UWE Bristol Engineering showcase 2015

Owain Robert Fullerton
Mechanical Engineering
Project Supervisor
Rohitha Weerasinghe
Seismic receiver cooling fin development
Seismic drilling has been around for many years and plays a crucial part in modern society. Whether it’s carrying out
seismic surveys or drilling for fossil fuels there will always be a requirement to use proven exploration techniques to
support energy and scientific projects. As technologies improve, methods and techniques for gathering information
about this seismic world will change but the fundamental principles remain the same. Large holes need to be bored deep
into the earth’s crust. Inevitably, problems will be encountered when taking on such a large engineering task, one of the
difficulties being the extreme pressures and heat that the bore tool will be exposed to.
For the initial stage of testing, experimental tests were carried out on basic geometries and provisional ‘mock’ tools to ensure that Ansys workbench was
primarily being used correctly with the ideal setup. Also these preliminary tests help to validate the accuracy of the results and estimate an error percentage.
This included;
exporting from computer aided design software (CAD)
Meshing the components to achieve highest realistic levels of accuracy without over computation to save time and valuable computing power/memory (Setting
the analysis and mathematical models up to achieve highest levels of accuracy possible (conduction, convection, radiation? Transient/steady?)
Use of Excel to calculate heat transfer coefficient for the fluid/solid interface
Use of Excel to calculate wall film coefficient
Use of Excel to carry out theoretical calculations of experiments to gain ball park figures of temperature change and heat flux across test components to validate
CFD results
Using acquired data to form graphs for ease of comparison and to evaluate initial findings
Conclusion to analyse advantages and disadvantages and also to improve future testing methods.
Project summary
An investigation has been taken in conjunction with
Avalon Sciences Ltd (ASL) to develop the design of
their existing heat sink fins specifically used to help
aid cooling of their seismic receivers.
Project Objectives
• Use of CFD analytical techniques to find bench
mark performance figures
• Create new fin designs and test using CFD
• Further validate chosen design with the use of
finite element techniques
Project Conclusion
• Computational methods are an effective way of
testing new designs accurately without having to
build prototypes and carry out extensive physical
testing. Different parameters can be set to help
predict how a concept design may perform in
desired environments.
• By increasing surface area of the tool body thermal
efficiency can be improved.
Design concept 5 achieved the best results. From the table
above the results were averaged and the favoured concept
achieved an overall improvement of 11.71%
The favoured concept modifications are pictured on the left.
• The most efficient design of the investigation was
concept design 5 which delivered an average of
11.71% improvement across the 4 tests, this
design has longer fins but also much narrower
recesses, the ridge between the recesses has been
narrowed slightly (this design may not be as
efficient when tested with a denser well fluid).