Gris Gun passes cost savings from prototype testing on to customers

Company Gris Gun Manufacturing Industry Heavy Equipment Location Canada Product Used COSMOSWorks Type of Analysis Linear Static More Details

The Challenge
Oil and natural gas don't spring from the spaces in rock formations all by themselves. Often, before fossil fuels can be pumped out, the rock formations have to be perforated by well-placed explosive charges.

Only a few companies make the equipment to do this, among them Gris Gun Manufacturing, Red Deer County, Alberta, Canada. Gris Gun Manufacturing, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tesco Corporation, Calgary, Alberta, manufactures a complete line of oilfield perforating guns and related wireline accessories.

Gris Gun needed to design a collet for a horizontal oil well perforating gun that can withstand high tensile loadings – from 70,000 psi to 110,000 psi – and still be flexible enough to release the perforating gun.

The Solution
To avoid overdesign, time-consuming conventional calculations, and the high cost of building and testing prototypes, Buzinsky chose to use COSMOSWorks to determine the flexibility of the collet fingers by analyzing the "lobes" at the end of the collet fingers, applying tension, internal pressure and, in some cases, torque.

"It’s intuitive to apply loads and restraints to the SolidWorks model," said Buzinsky. "COSMOSWorks gives us that touch of reality we need. The time to market is substantially quicker and we can pass cost savings on the customer. I finished analyzing four complex components in about two hours the other day. This would normally have taken me four to five weeks."

Summary and Metrics:

• Reduced analysis time from 4-5 weeks to 2 hours
• Reduced prototype testing
• Reduced time to market