Many friends want to know which PDC bit or cone bit has better performance. We need specific analysis of specific problems. For example, there are many drilling fields, including oil and gas, geothermal, mines, water wells, trenchless, etc. Specific drilling methods can be divided into vertical drilling, horizontal drilling, reverse circulation drilling, etc.
Based on different working conditions, it is difficult for us to say which is better. If we consider the expectations of users, some users expect to drill faster, and some users expect to accumulate more meters of footage, it is even more difficult to say whether PDC drill bit or roller cone drill bit is better.
However, in many cases, the performance of the PDC bit can be better, this is what?
We know that the cone bit is assembled by many parts, and the precision requirements of each part are very high, so that the cone of the assembled cone bit can achieve self-cleaning and tight meshing, and the outer diameter tolerance is within the standard range. The parts of the cone bit mainly include tooth palm, tooth wheel, alloy tooth, rubber sealing ring, ball, oil bladder, oil cup, etc. The tooth wheel and tooth palm are forged, and the minimum order quantity is generally in tons. Alloy teeth have different outer diameters, shapes and heights. The period of making one or several alloy teeth is relatively long, and the die cost is relatively high. Other accessories are not listed one by one.
Besides, the tooling and fixtures used for machining cone bits are used to install on numerical control machining centers and other equipment. For example, the tooling and fixtures required by machine tools to produce 8 1/2 inch IADC 517 and 8 1/2 inch AIDC537 palms are slightly different, and even a slight change in wheel size will cause a series of changes, and the costs behind these changes are very high.
To sum up, changing the design structure of a cone bit may affect the whole body, thus requiring a high cost of raw materials, mold costs, tooling costs and even time costs.
 
Let's look at the PDC bit. The PDC bit is mainly assembled from two parts, the bit body and the composite sheet. The bit body can be divided into the matrix and steel body, in recent years, the use of the matrix PDC bit less and less, steel body with low cost, fast footage, low failure rate advantage, the use of more and more high proportion.
The steel body of the PDC drill bit uses round steel as the raw material and is processed by a CNC machining center. The raw material composition is simple, and the production and processing do not require complicated tooling and fixtures. The mainstream sizes of PDC composite sheets are 13mm, 16mm, 19mm and even the less used 8mm, 11mm, 22mm and so on, which can be easily and quickly installed on the drill body.
 
Returning to the question posed in the title of this article, how can PDC bits outperform roller cone bits? As mentioned above, we can see that the PDC bit can be easily and quickly customized. On this basis, we design, produce, and test drilling. After testing, we start a new round of analysis, adjustment design, production, and testing according to the wear of the PDC bit. After several rounds of adjustment tests, we can get a targeted bit for this formation, whether in the speed of the footage or the overall number of footage, we can meet our expectations.
In summary, the customizability of the PDC bit allows it to achieve the maximum matching of a certain block and the use environment through continuous testing and improvement, and then get the best performance. This is difficult for roller cone drills to do.