The Explosive Bonded Packer

During my undergraduate days I ran a shock physics lab primarily studying the welding window for explosively welding dis-similar materials. You can find a very brief article on the subject here. The gentleman I worked for at the time was considered one of the world's experts on the subject. I published a few journal articles and learned quite a bit. A few years later I was working at my career job and I got a phone call out of the blue. The caller told me that he got my name and organization from a quite obscure thing known as a world wide web search, Netscape was still fairly new and the only real browser, and he understood I knew something about explosive welding.

I replied that I did, but I had been working on other things for some time. "no problem, I have an idea I would like to try to develop" he said. Thus was born the Explosive Bonded Packer. The idea was fairly simple. Take a smaller diameter tube and bond it to a larger casing downhole to create a permanent packer for injecting various fluids into an oil well. So before one starts cobbling together test items and whatnot it's always best to explore the variable space with computational simulations. The video shows one of those simulations.

EBP Simulation

After simulating the system and making a lot of calculations I put together a first test item. Surprisingly, the thing worked, right out of the chute. After a few design iterations and packaging of the system for field use I tested a prototype. The photo below shows a sectioned portion of the test item.

Sectioned Portion of an EBP

I also pressure tested the system and it held at 3000 psi which was well beyond the required use pressure. In the next photo I show a close-up of the interface of the tube to casing. Yes it could be sanded and polished better, but you can make out where the interface starts to disappear where the bonding has occurred. This type of bonding is a solid state process and the bond can occur at the atomic level, as in diffusion welding. In other words the two items are no longer distinguishable from one another. In some cases the bond zone is invisible at even the highest optical magnification levels.

Close-up of the Bonded Area

It worked and then the price of oil jumped. The oil company I did the work for didn't care about the life of the packers they were using and tripping the well entered a "don't care" state. Still, it was a gratifying piece of work.