All-metal well packer for geothermal made with 3D printing

Geothermal Manufacturing Prize winners with their awards (source: U.S. Department of Energy)

A well packer designed for geothermal subsurface conditions designed by Downhole Emerging Technologies (DET) has been manufactured by 3D printing specialist Protolabs. The technology used to build the well packer was direct metal laser sintering (DMLS), an industrial-grade 3D printing process.

DET had been previously selected as one of the winning teams of the American-Made Geothermal Manufacturing Prize by the U.S. Department of Energy. The team was awarded with USD 500,000 in cash and up to USD 200,000 for field testing of their innovative projects. The winning entry of DET was an all-metal, retrievable packer system called the Diamond Extreme Temperate Isolation Packed (E-TIP) designed for the high temperatures, high pressures, and corrosive nature of geothermal wells

After multiple attempts of designing the part to made using conventional machining, DET settles on additive manufacturing (AM) or 3D printing. Ken Havlinek, CEO of DET, described how AM was the optimal choice because of the packer’s novel design. “We designed it to take less force to compress it and stretch it and get the exact same deformation and performance out [of it]. …[W]e wanted to use as little energy as possible to get this thing set and then to get this thing unset or retracted. The smallest amount of force to get those operations done the better. So [AM] allowed us to reduce those forces needed.”

Aside from the packer, DET had designed an entirely new complementary setting system. Realizing these complex designs, especially within the limited timeframe of the American-Made competition, was only possible thru AM.

Additive manufacturing has been identified as one of the top technology trends for future geothermal projects in an article written by Dr. Ghazal Izadi of Baker Hughes. The use of 3D printing to manufacture replacement parts for geothermal power plants in Italy had been previously explored by Enel.

Source: 3Dprint.com