Numerical Study on the Impact of Spiral Tortuous Hole on Cuttings Removal in Horizontal Wells

Summary Horizontal wells are designed to have smooth (straight), curved, and lateral sections. However, the actual drilled path usually suffers from unwanted undulations from the planned well trajectory known as wellbore tortuosity. Wellbore tortuosity can slow the drilling penetration rate, aggravate drillstring vibration and buckling, complicate the casing and cement job, and lead to inaccurate wellbore position. This paper presents a validated computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model to investigate the impact of wellbore tortuosity on hole cleaning. The Eulerian-Eulerian approach is used to simulate solid-liquid laminar flow in annular geometry using polyhedral mesh. Then, the impact of wellbore tortuosity on cuttings accumulation, annular pressure loss, and fluid velocity was investigated and compared with the flow behavior in a straight horizontal well. A parametric analysis of spiral period length, spiral amplitude, drillstring rotation, flow rate, annular eccentricity, drilling rate of penetration (ROP), and cuttings size was conducted to assess their influence on cuttings transport in spiral tortuous holes and their relative magnitude to other design or operating factors. Simulation results show that polyhedral mesh is an optimum meshing technique for spiral profile geometry. Wellbore tortuosity aggravates hole cleaning in lateral sections based on the length of the spiral period and/or the spiral amplitude. Reduction in cuttings velocity was observed in the top part of the spiral geometry (crest), causing large deposition of cuttings in this area compared to the spiral lower part (trough). Drillstring rotation from 0 to 200 rev/min is the critical range for efficient hole cleaning in spiral geometry. Cuttings size can improve cuttings accumulation if the particle size is larger than the viscous layer located near the bed velocity profile. The drilling ROP and annular eccentricity aggravate cuttings accumulation and bed deposition in a spiral hole, similar to what is normally observed in straight horizontal wells.

Application of Polyhedral Mesh for Vortex Formation Study for Simple Single Pump Sump

Meshing of domain in CFD is an important step to ensure accuracy of the solution. In the past, hexahedral or tetrahedral mesh systems were commonly used, and both have their merits and demerits. For large and complex geometry, polyhedral is another option but its accuracy is claimed to be lacking. In this paper, the use of polyhedral mesh system by past researchers are reviewed. Evaluation on the application of polyhedral mesh system for the study of the vortex formation with a simple single pump sump model is made. Validation was made through the comparison of the results from hexahedral, tetrahedral and polyhedral mesh sizes and the experimental data from published data. The polyhedral mesh system was found to perform satisfactorily and was able to match the results from the hexahedral mesh system as well as the experimental data.

Meshing Strategi untuk Memprediksi Hambatan Total pada Kapal Planing Hull

A high-speed vessel has a range of Froude Number (Fr) > 1. A drag prediction method based on Fr > 1 has high complexity because it is influenced by trim and heave motions. Hence, a specific treatment is necessary to obtain accurate results. This study is using mesh density and mesh shapes to predict the total drag of a planing hull ship. The Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) results show good performance in predicting the drag, trim, and heave. Mesh density of 2300K shows the most stabilized result. The trimmed mesh type is more efficient to obtain accurate results because it has a smaller mesh size. The polyhedral mesh type is as good as trimmed mesh but is not as efficient as trimmed mesh and it has largely a time-consuming time.

Exploring three-dimensional edge-based smoothed finite element method based on polyhedral mesh to study elastic mechanics problems

This paper established the three-dimensional edge-based smoothed finite element method(ES-FEM) based on polyhedral mesh, divided the smoothed domain, constructed the shape function and derived the geometric matrix and the stiffness matrix. The MATLAB software was used to prepare the corresponding computing programs, with which the paper studied the stress distribution of a hollow sphere model and a beam model under different numbers of polyhedral elements. The paper compared the calculation results from the conventional finite element methods(FEM) that use tetrahedral elements and hexahedral elements respectively in terms of stress relative error and energy relative error. The comparison results show that the three-dimensional ES-FEM based on polyhedral mesh has better precision and convergence than the conventional FEM and better adaptability to complex geometric structures.

CFD Simulations of the Cold Neutron Source at the OPAL Reactor

The Open Pool Australian Light-water (OPAL) reactor Cold Neutron Source (CNS) is a 20 L liquid deuterium thermosiphon system which has performed consistently but will require replacement in the future. The CNS deuterium exploits neutronic heating to passively drive the thermosiphon loop and is cryogenically cooled by forced convective helium flow via a heat exchanger. In this study, a detailed computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of the complete thermosiphon system was developed for simulation. Unlike previous studies, the simulation employed a novel polyhedral mesh technique. Results demonstrated that the polyhedral technique reduced simulation computational requirements and convergence time by an order of magnitude while predicting thermosiphon performance to within 1% accuracy when compared with prototype experiments. The simulation model was extrapolated to OPAL operating conditions and confirmed the versatility of the CFD model as an engineering design and preventative maintenance tool. Finally, simulations were performed on a proposed second-generation CNS design that increases the CNS moderator deuterium volume by 5 L, and results confirmed that the geometry maintains the thermosiphon deuterium in the liquid state and satisfies the CNS design criteria.