COMSOL Helps Trim Prototyping Costs for Energy Tech Company

In the oil & gas industry, measuring gas quality as it is extracted can help ensure the product meets quality standards before moving forward with the refinement process. To do this, Baker Hughes, an energy technology company, uses pulse-echo and pitch-catch testing, which incorporates ultrasonic transducers to identify impurities. To enhance its transducer design, Baker Hughes turned to COMSOL for assistance.

"Overall, simulations have been saving us about 30% on prototyping costs," says Haiqi Wen, a lead scientist at Baker Hughes. "In the past, when we needed to order new transducers, we would usually order a batch of different transducers with different specs. But now that we have been using simulation software like COMSOL Multiphysics, we just need to verify that there are a few good designs in the batch. Then, we just need to order those designs instead of ordering all of the new transducer designs and testing which one performs the best."

Modeling piezoelectric transducers with COMSOL Multiphysics software enabled the team to couple fluid to the transducers, elastic waves to pressure acoustics, and an external electrical circuit to the terminal of the piezoelectric element. These couplings enabled accurate examination of how multiple physics phenomena interact and model the transformation of voltage signals to elastic waves as well as fluid–structure interaction at the transducer's boundary with customized circuit parameters.

The team built an axisymmetric 2D transducer model as well as a full 3D model and validated both models against experimental testing. The simulation sends out a brief pulse signal that strikes the cement surface of the well. The wave propagation was nearly identical in the two models, and there was agreement between the pressure probe responses.

Additionally, Wen and his team used COMSOL Multiphysics to simulate and optimize pulse-echo and pitch-catch testing. The pulse-echo simulation highlights an ultrasonic nondestructive testing (NDT) technique that sends out ultrasonic pulse waves to identify defects in materials or analyze the reflective waveforms for information. Simulating the two testing methods in COMSOL Multiphysics allows for efficiency in gathering data from the ultrasonic pulse waves, and modeling the transducer conserves resources while optimizing the design.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.