Product Testing & Evaluation

At US Synthetic, we subject our cutters to rigorous testing to ensure they meet the highest quality standards. This includes extensive impact, abrasion, and heavy wear tests in our testing facilities, as well as extensive downhole testing in the field. As a result, US Synthetic PDCs have gained a reputation, built and maintained over many years, for superior quality, durability, and performance.

Laboratory tests help our product development staff transform several good ideas into one concrete solution, which we can then recommend to a customer. Comparing these new solutions to cutters already running successfully in the field minimizes the risk of downhole failure during field testing.

The drop impact test evaluates the impact strength of our cutters. This test emulates the type of loading that might be encountered when the bit transitions from one formation to another or experiences lateral and axial vibrations.

Accurately testing resistance to abrasion is an important step in the development process of every new product. Our abrasion test involves cutting granite and comparing the amount of diamond wear to the amount of granite cut. Typically, several million times more granite than diamond wears away in such a test. Information from this test allows us to tailor the abrasion resistance characteristics of our cutters to the needs of specific applications.

This long-term durability test is conducted on a vertical turret lathe and combines elements of both abrasion and impact testing. As the cutter cuts through miles of rock, we monitor temperature and cutting forces. This allows us to evaluate cutter aggressiveness, efficiency, and thermal stability.

Ultimately, we believe the field is the most important test, and we gear our lab tests to pass only the best cutters to the field testing stage of product development.