Multi-Sensor Acoustic Parameter Analysis System for Monitoring, and Performance Prediction of Deep Drilling and Stimulation Operations

Summary Acoustic Emission (AE) based systems have been under development and used at Fraunhofer IEG to monitor, evaluate, and control conventional and novel drilling processes and their pertinent equipment used in geothermal and drilling applications. Moreover, novel jetting and drilling operations in deep geothermal reservoirs do heavily rely on such new technologies in order to be able to control them properly and thus, to result in a viable technical and economical option. AE monitoring is based on the detection and conversion of elastic waves into electrical signals, which are associated with a rapid release of localized stress-energy propagating within a material. It is passive testing, logging, and analysis method to evaluate changes in the properties and behavior of machines and mineral type materials such as rocks. Such changes may be induced by drilling, jetting, or other drilling methods and being recorded, characterized, and evaluated via an AE system and will be used ultimately used for process performance prediction using machine learning methods. This is the core of the novel monitoring system development, the AE based, so-called Multi-Sensor acoustic parameter analysis as the primary control and monitoring mechanism during rock breaking, drilling, jetting, and stimulation.