Drill Pipes Inspection Services

How often should drill pipe inspection take place?

There is no definitive answer to this question. It really depends on the conditions you're drilling in. When drilling in a shallow well, the pipes are not exposed to a great deal of fatigue, so less frequent inspection is required. On the other hand, deep well drilling could result in more stress to the pipe and inspection periods will need to be shorter.

The fourth edition of DS1 vol. 3 states:

The usual practice has been to set inspection frequency on some arbitrary basis such as footage drilled or hours rotated. Such estimates are little better than wild guesses because they don't take into account how the components in question are loaded. Neither do they consider the probable failure modes.

Considerations for scheduling re-inspection

Given that the initial inspection was correctly done, the factors that should determine when re-inspection is needed are accumulated fatigue and accumulated wear:

• Fatigue:Accumulated fatigue damage on drill pipe tubes should determine when to schedule a re-inspection
• Load capacity: Load capacity will be affected by wear on tool joints and tube bodies. Therefore, scheduling inspections for overload considerations should be done on the basis of cumulative wear, A good practice and one we use at GUCL, is to inspect all the pipes on return after each job. This method ensures top quality equipment is ready and provided to our customer.

Gauging of Threaded Joint