As a kind of unconventional gas reservoirs, shale gas reservoirs are full of potential to develop and have attracted global attention. Accompanying the exploiting of shale gas, a large amount of drilling cuttings contaminated by the oil-based drilling fluid are generated inevitably. How to deal with the drilling cuttings in a environmental-friendly way is tough especially for offshore oilfield. So it is important to investigate this aspect deeply and develop methods to clean the contaminated drilling cuttings. As is known to all, the thermal desorption technology has outstanding performance in oily cuttings cleaning. This paper bases on a kind of mechanical-thermal cuttings cleaning apparatus where the contaminated drilling cuttings are heated up by friction heat produced by the friction between the cuttings and the agitating vanes. And the harmful substance is separated from the cuttings in the agitated and high temperature flow field. This thesis investigates the fundamental of the energy conversion in the frictional process, infer formulas analyzing the thermo-physical phenomena and quantitatively model the energy conversion and thermal transmission accompanying the friction.
Firstly, the principle of heat transfer and the law of conservation of energy are employed to investigate the natural law of the energy conversion in the frictional process. Based on the investigation, taking the liquid bridge between the oily cuttings and the agitating vane into account, this paper deduces the physical equations and the frictional energy model to calculate the total frictional heat, heat density and temperature distribution.
Following up the frictional model, in the Eulerian-Lagrangian coupling framework, this paper develops a parallel numerical platform of computational fluid dynamics combined with discrete element method (CFD-DEM). In the coupling approach, the gas motion is solved at the computational grid level while the solid motion is resolved at the particle-scale level. Furthermore, the coupling approach is extended with the frictional energy model. The numerical platform can calculate the dense gas-solid motion in the fluidizing apparatus, the convective heat transfer between gas and solid phase, and the conductive heat transfer between particles. Based on the platform, the mechanical-thermal energy conversion and the convective heat transfer between gas and oily cuttings, and the conductive heat transfer between cuttings and the agitating vanes are investigated. Meanwhile an experiment is conducted. By comparing the numerical results with the experiment data, the paper can come to the conclusion that how to dispose the nonlinear parameters such as the friction contact area, the friction coefficient and the normal pressure is the key to accurately model the energy conversion and the heat transmission. What’s more, it can be understood that the convective heat transfer between gas and solid phase play an important role in the heat transmission.
