Experiment on Mechanical Properties and Seepage Capability of Deep Tight Sandstone Under True-Triaxial Stresses Environment

The characteristics of seepage capability and rock strain during reservoir depletion are important for reservoir recovery, which would significantly influence production strategy optimization. The Cretaceous deep natural gas reservoirs in Keshen Gasfield in Tarim Basin are mainly buried over 5000 m, featuring with ultra-low permeability, developed natural fractures and complex in-situ stress states. However, there is no comprehensive study on the variation of mechanical properties and seepage capability of this gas reservoir under in-situ stress conditions and most studies on stress-sensitivity are conducted under conventional triaxial or uniaxial stress conditions, which cannot truly represent in-situ stress environment. In this work, Cretaceous tight sandstone in Keshen Gasfield was tested under true-triaxial stresses conditions by an advanced geophysical imaging true-triaxial testing system to study the stress-sensitivity and anisotropy of rock stress-strain behavior, porosity and permeability. Four groups of sandstone samples are prepared as the size of 80mm×80mm×80mm, three of which are artificially fractured with different angle (0°,15°，30°) to simulate hydraulic fracturing. The test results corresponding to different samples are compared to further reveal the influence of the fracture angle on rock mechanical properties and seepage capability. The samples are in elastic strain during reservoir depletion, showing an apparent correlation with fracture angles. The porosity decreases linearly with stress loading, where the decrease rate of effective porosity of fracture samples is significantly higher than that of intact samples. The permeabilities decrease exponentially and show significant anisotropy in different principal stress directions, especially in σH direction. The mechanical properties and seepage capability of deep tight sandstone are successfully tested under true-triaxial stresses conditions in this work, which reveals the stress-sensitivity of anisotropic permeability, porosity and stress-strain behavior during gas production. The testing results proposed in this paper provides an innovative method to analyse rock mechanical and petrophysical properties and has profound significance on exploration and development of tight gas reservoir.

Wear and Fretting Behavior of Cold Sprayed IN625 Superalloy

The wear and fretting behaviour of IN625 cold spray coatings was analysed and the results are presented. The cold spray conditions were selected in order to obtain coatings with minimum porosity and maximum particles splat. This leads to compact and hard deposited material able to resist wear damaging and to dissipate energy during fretting. The coating’s strength was evaluated through nanoindentation that revealed an increased hardness from the surface toward the substrate. This different hardening behaviour from the coating surface toward the substrate leads to increased resistance to fretting and wear as the maximum stresses increase. This was revealed by scratch tests performed at linearly increasing loads that allowed identifying of the damage mechanisms acting on the coating as the triaxial stresses increase. The hardening behaviour of the coating also influenced the fretting behaviour revealed by the weight loss experienced by varying the fretting maximum load.

VistaDam: A Physics Based Ductile Fracture Model for Pressurized Pipe Failure

We present VistaDam, a physics-based ductile fracture material model that is tailored to predict failure in thin metal sheets. VistaDam is based on a three invariant plasticity model in which metal fracture is dependent on the combined evolution of the triaxial stresses as well as the third invariant of deviatoric stress. Thus, VistaDam can predict damage due to combined volumetric void growth and shear dilation; which provides VistaDam with a superior capability to describe and predict fracture in a wide range of loading ranges. VistaDam relies on three independent material parameters that can be calibrated from experimental data at different triaxiality. Calibration is achieved through the automated calibration tool VistaCal. The calibrated VistaDam material card can be readily used in explicit FEM packages such as Abaqus and LS-DYNA. In addition, the calibrated VistaDam model can be used as a virtual testing platform that can generate data required by data-driven models such as GISSMO and Johnson-Cook. This process is currently automated within VistaCal’s graphical user interface. VistaDam and VistaCal have been developed for Navy applications and have been deployed successfully to predict pressurized pipes and vessel deformation and fracture under extreme loading conditions.

Modeling the Mechanical Response of a Dual-Phase Steel Based on Individual-Phase Tensile Properties

In this work, the engineering stress–strain tensile curve and the force-deflection bending curve of two Dual-Phase (DP) steels are modeled, combining the mechanical data of fully ferritic and fully martensitic steels. The data is coupled by a modified law of mixture, which includes a partition parameter q that takes into account the strength and strain distributions in both martensite and ferrite phases. The resulting constitutive model is solved in the context of the finite element method assuming a modified mixture rule in which a new parameter q′ is defined in order to extend the capabilities of the model to deal with triaxial stresses and strains and thus achieve a good agreement between experimental results and numerical predictions. The model results show that the martensite only deforms elastically, while the ferrite deforms both elastically and plastically. Furthermore, the partition factor q′ is found to strongly depend on the ferritic strain level. Finally, it is possible to conclude that the maximum strength of the studied DP steels is moderately influenced by the maximum strength of martensite.