Efficiency in drilling is measured by Mechanical Specific Energy (MSE). MSE is the measure of the amount of energy input required to remove a unit volume of rock, expressed in units of energy input divided by volume removed. It can be expressed mathematically in terms of controllable parameters; Weight on Bit, Torque, Rate of Penetration, and RPM. It is well documented that minimizing MSE by optimizing controllable factors results in maximum Rate of Penetration. Current methods for computing MSE make it possible to minimize MSE in the field only through a trial-and-error process. This work makes it possible to compute the optimum drilling parameters that result in minimum MSE. The parameters that have been traditionally used to compute MSE are interdependent. Mathematical relationships between the parameters were established, and the conventional MSE equation was rewritten in terms of a single parameter, Weight on Bit, establishing a form that can be minimized mathematically. Once the optimum Weight on Bit was determined, the interdependent relationship that Weight on Bit has with Torque and Penetration per Revolution was used to determine optimum values for those parameters for a given drilling situation. The improved method was validated through laboratory experimentation and analysis of published …

The push to provide ever brighter coherent radiation sources has led to the creation of correspondingly bright electron beams. With billions of electrons packed into normalized emittances (phase space) below one micron, collective effects may dominate both the preservation and use of such ultra-bright beams. An important class of collective effects is due to density modulations within the bunch, or microbunching. Microbunching may be deleterious, as in the case of the Microbunching Instability (MBI), or it may drive radiation sources of unprecedented intensity, as in the case of Free Electron Lasers (FELs). In this work we begin by describing models of microbunching due to inherent beam shot noise, which sparks both the MBI as well as SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source, the world's first hard X-ray laser. We first use this model to propose a mechanism for reducing the inherent beam shot noise as well as for predicting MBI effects. We then describe experimental measurements of the resulting microbunching at LCLS, including optical radiation from the MBI, as well as the first gain length and harmonic measurements from a hard X-ray FEL. In the final chapters, we describe schemes that use external laser modulations to microbunch light sources of the …