Paper: STEEL FACTORS THAT AFFECT RELIABILITY OF SUCKER RODS FROM MILL TO WELL

Failures in the sucker rod industry can be costly and time consuming. A thorough understanding of the critical factors affecting the overall reliability of steel is important to address these failures. Sucker rod manufacturing involves a lot of processes from different industries. The manufacturing and servicing of steel sucker rods involves a chain of processes starting with the steel mills, sucker rod manufacturer and eventually goes to the end user. There are a lot of critical factors involved in every step of the process before the product goes down hole. The goal of this paper is to prevent failures through awareness and education of critical factors affecting the overall reliability of
steel products used in oil production. The topics addressed in this paper are as follows: 1. Methods of steel rolling (traditional ingots vs. modern continuous casting). 2. Induction heating & upsetting and factors affecting the final quality of the steel. 3. Heat Treatment and factors affecting quality and reliability of steel. 4. Shot peening vs. shot blasting. 5. CNC machining. 6. Factors affecting overall reliability in the field.