Tue, 29 November, 2022
Fraunhofer IEG’s Volker Wittig was the expert speaker at a recent webinar about new developments in ‘Down the Hole’ (DTH) drilling systems.
Mining and the oil and gas industries have been successfully using DTH hammer drilling technologies for many years, with both air and fluid / liquid-driven systems available on the market.
DTH hammers typically use a piston moved by hydraulic power or compressed air to apply alternating loads onto the drill bit that crushes rock at the bottom of the borehole to delve deeper into the rock.
The quality of these drilling systems heavily determines the service life of the tool, making fluid consumption, wellbore control and cutting transport more difficult than with conventional rotary drilling technologies using drill mud.
To resolve this issue, novel DTH hammer systems able to run with drill mud for drilling deep, hard rock have been under development. These include a novel DTH-type percussion mechanism that works with just one moving part as developed by Fraunhofer IEG.
These novel new hammers will help to make percussion drilling more successful and cost-effective.
You can see a recording of Volker’s webinar, ‘State of the Art and New Developments of Hydraulic DTH Percussion Drilling Systems for Deep, Hard Rock, Geothermal Type Drilling Operations,’ below:
The Geo-Drill project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 815319