Establishing oil wells in the Middle East requires a large investment in time, equipment, and money. Petroleum-producing companies that hire service companies to get their wells going set a high performance standard, demanding zero error and consistent, high levels of success.
When one oil driller needed special equipment – a robust, redundant cementing skid – it turned to Sanjel Corp., a specialized energy service company headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Sanjel designed and manufactured a cementing skid using its new SCM (Sanjel Cyclonic Mixer) cement mixing technology. Adapting an aggressive design stance and SolidWorks® 3D CAD software, Sanjel produced a working unit in 6 short months.
“Our designers and the fabrication team collaborated in real time around SolidWorks 3D models,” said Kris Sato, senior mechanical designer at Sanjel Corp. “This helped us deliver quickly on an important product that could easily have taken two years to build. SolidWorks software gave everyone involved a clear picture of what we were working on and working toward. SolidWorks kept us moving fast.”
What Does the SCM Skid Do?
The SCM skid provides cementing services for oil wells, including performing primary cementing tasks, such as cementing the steel casing in the well; remedial cementing, like cement squeezes where a target zone in the oil well’s column is slated for production; or executing well kills to keep the pressure of the formation fluids from entering the well bore. An equipment failure in these sensitive and critical jobs can mean a delay in petroleum production or severe damage to the oil well, costing time and money.
Sanjel's SCM skid is a self-contained mobile unit that can be transported on a large winch truck from site to site over unpaved desert roads or on the back of a low-boy trailer on a paved highway.
How Software Slashed Development Time
To develop the custom cementing unit, Sanjel used SolidWorks Simulation software to ensure it is rugged enough to withstand being loaded up onto the back of a winch truck, being lifted onto a cargo ship by crane, sustaining impacts from vehicles and machinery, and enduring conditions commonly encountered in the oilfield.
SolidWorks Flow Simulation software helped ensure the cement slurry would flow smoothly through the unit's piping, which consists of Ts, elbows, valves, and other fittings. Any "dead zones" would allow settling of the slurry, creating a plug in the piping and affecting the operation of the unit.
Design engineers used SolidWorks eDrawings® email-enabled design communication software to help various people, from welders to executives, to see, understand, and evaluate the design of the cementing skid. The sheet metal package in SolidWorks allowed designers to provide welders with quick and accurate pipe templates for various copes found at piping joints within minutes. It would have taken them about an hour to generate each one by hand.
“We’d edit a design in real time, refresh the assembly, display the new piping run, and the guys would put it together,” said Sato. “We quickly arrived at the most logical, functional and fabrication-friendly piping run, and we did it fast. Methods like these, and the power of 3D design, let us do this in 6 months versus 2 years.”
SolidWorks also helped Sanjel collaborate with suppliers.
"The SCM skid utilizes OEM components such as its engines,” he continued. “Having OEM vendors that also use SolidWorks allowed us to drop in their engine / transmission / radiator assembly into our skid layout. This saved us time and provided a more accurate layout that ensured that we could confidently design around OEM components without worrying about fit."