In the scope of the European Union EID (European Industrial Doctorates) project HYDRA on “HYdraulics modelling for DRilling Automation” the following three Ph.D. positions have been filled:

 

• PhD 1: at the Department of Mechanical Engineering (in the Dynamics and Control group) of the Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands, on “Automatic model reduction techniques for hydraulic drilling models: modelling for estimation & control“,

 

• PhD 2: at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands, on “Automatic model reduction techniques for hydraulic drilling models: modelling for numerical simulation“,

 

• PhD 3: at the Centre Automatiques de Systèmes, MINES ParisTech, France, on “Simplified model-based estimation of downhole parameters for drilling”.

 

The HYDRA project is financed by EU as an Innovative Training Program within the Horizon2020 program, in particular as a an EID (European Industrial Doctorates) project.

The scientific objective of HYDRA is to develop a framework for multi-phase hydraulic modeling and model complexity reduction for drilling operations, delivered in software directly usable in industry. The resulting models uniquely combine high predictive capacity and low complexity enabling their usage in both virtual drilling scenario testing and drilling automation.

 

Within all three Ph.D. positions, the researchers will spend 50% of their time at their hosting university and 50% of their time at Kelda Drilling Controls in Norway. This will provide the Ph.D. students with a unique opportunity to combine academic research and training with industrial R&D. Throughout the project, and especially during the visits to Kelda, we expect intensive collaboration between the 3 PhD. students.