Sharif Digital Repository

The capability level of rotary as well as first generation drilling operation could not be matched for deeply drilling programs. To reach that deep, the increasing in drill string length could also cause an additional constraint on hydraulic performance. The operation of slim hole drilling has significant potential to reduce well costs. This cost might be savings are especially important with increased demand for reduced capital finance under current economic conditions in the Iranian oil and gas industry. This savings achievement could be caused by use of smaller drilling rigs, work over rigs, reduced casing size, reducing requirement for drilling consumables and other costs associated with... 

The authors carried out the study to prepare chitosan N-isopropylacrylamide hydrogel via heating and radiation processes. Properties investigation of prepared samples revealed that radiation prepared samples show higher yield and swelling ratios in comparison with the heating prepared ones. Effects of hydrogel addition to drilling mud on its important rheological properties such as apparent viscosity, plastic viscosity, and stress-strain behavior are measured. The rheological properties of hydrogel were compared with cellulosemethylcarboxyl and resins that are widely used in drilling fluid. The results demonstrate that whereas linear polymer effects on mud properties are more significant in... 

Asphaltene deposition causes serious problems in the oil industry. Variation of oil composition and reservoir pressure is reported to be the most important factors that influence asphaltene deposition from reservoir oil. In this study, a mathematical model was developed to simulate asphaltene deposition during primary depletion and CO2 injection. The main purpose of this study is to investigate and to compare asphaltene deposition mechanisms due to primary depletion and CO2 injection. The solid model as thermodynamic model was applied to investigate asphaltene precipitation. A numerical model was established to the governing equations both in space and time and model parameters were... 

Asphaltene deposition in a reservoir severely reduces the effective permeability and results in a reduction in oil production. The main term in asphaltene deposition modeling in the porous media is pore surface deposition. Previous models do not describe the effects of different parameters (i.e., concentration, velocity, and temperature) on the pore surface deposition term. We report the results of a series of experiments carried out to study the effects of the above parameters on the surface deposition term using an accurate thermal method. Based on these data, a new expression for the surface deposition term has been developed and implemented in asphaltene deposition modeling. The... 

The particle shape is an important factor playing critical role in evaluation of the interactions between particles in high-concentration particle-fluid flows. In this paper, the well-known multisphere (MS) approximation approach and the novel rolling resistance approach are utilized to examine their performance in order to simplify the generalized shaped particle’s interactions within the framework of discrete element method (DEM) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The performance of two approaches are compared with the perfect particle’s shape geometry, for the limited cases of cubic-shaped and disk-shaped particle flows in a horizontal well drilling process as a reference scenario.... 

Increasing cuttings bed height is a serious concern during extended-reach well drilling. In order to predict and prevent cuttings bed height increase, it is essential to study how the critical parameters influence the cuttings transport, especially the drill pipe rotation effects on the cuttings transport process. In conventional models for cuttings transport, the dynamic behavior of particles due to drill pipe rotation is neglected or empirically simplified. This paper presents a coupled Computational Fluid Dynamics and Discrete Element Method (CFD-DEM) approach to simulate the cuttings transport considering the dynamic collision process. The fluid phase is treated as an Eulerian continuum... 

Recently, a renewed interest arises in the application of nanotechnology for the upstream petroleum industry. In particular, adding nanoparticles to fluids may drastically benefit enhanced oil recovery (EOR) and improve well drilling, by changing the properties of the fluid, rocks wettability alteration, advanced drag reduction, strengthening the sand consolidation, reducing the interfacial tension and increasing the mobility of the capillary trapped oil. In this study, we focus on roles of clay nano-particles on polymer viscosity. Polymer-flooding schemes for recovering residual oil have been in general less than satisfactory due to loss of chemical components by adsorption on reservoir... 

During the well drilling process, particles are produced in different shapes. The shape of particles can influence the characteristics of particles transport process. The aim of this work is to analyze the effects of particle shape on the transportation mechanism. For this purpose, a three-dimensional model is prepared for simulation of particle transportation with spherical and non-spherical shapes, during deviated well drilling. The motion of particles and the non-Newtonian fluid flow are simulated via discrete element method and CFD, respectively. The two-way coupling scheme is used to incorporate the effects of fluid-particle interactions. Three different samples of non-spherical shapes... 

In this work, a reliable dimensionless correlation is proposed for prediction of permeability reduction rate in porous media, which is verified by experimental data obtained in this work in glass bead and sand pack as well as the core data from the literature. Although this correlation is based on the data which were obtained in our work in glass bead and sand-packed media at low pressure, it shows considerable flexibility to match with the extracted data for sandstone cores at high pressure, various flow rates, different temperatures and concentrations of calcium, and sulfate ions in brine solutions. In addition, a novel relationship for predicting the rate of precipitation of CaSO4 in... 

In this work, simultaneous inferential control of particle size distribution (PSD) and molecular weight distribution (MWD) in a semi-batch emulsion polymerization reactor of styrene has been addressed. Using a comprehensive dynamic model for PSD and MWD predictions and performing a sensitivity analysis, it has been revealed that free surfactant and chain transfer agent (CTA) concentrations in the reactor are the most suitable candidates for inferential control of PSD and MWD, respectively. To control concentrations of these species in the reactor, their inlet feed flow rates are used as manipulated variables. It is assumed that the concentration of CTA is measured infrequently and therefore... 

In this work, an experimental and theoretical study has been conducted to investigate the permeability reduction due to CaSO4 scale deposition in packed column porous media. Permeability reduction by calcium sulphate deposition follows a systematic trend considering various important parameters that are affected in this complex process. Hence, a novel dimensionless model has been proposed for the prediction of permeability reduction rate with high accuracy. The developed model is based on the data obtained from glass bead and carbonate grain packed column at low pressure. The proposed model was validated with Berea sandstone cores data at high pressure (100-20,678 kPa), various flow rates... 

The accurate and precise computational models in order to predict the hole cleaning process is one of the helpful assets in drilling industries. Besides the bulk properties such as the flow velocity, particles average size, cleaning fluid properties, etc., that will affect the cleaning process, there is an unanswered question about the microscopic properties of the particles, particularly those which determines the contact characteristics: Do those play a major role or not? The rudimentary answer is not. The first purpose of the present work is to answer this question via a developed computational fluid dynamics coupled with discrete element method (CFD–DEM) in which the six unknown rolling... 

In this paper, the impact of three parameters including nanoparticles geometry, particles aggregation and borehole inclination on induced formation damage from water based drilling fluids were investigated by means of experimental studies. Accordingly, we designed a dynamic filtration setup capable to rotate and change well inclination. Nano-based drilling fluids consisting of spherical, cubical and tubular shapes nanoparticles as fluid loss additives were used. Mud cake quality, core permeability impairment and degree of formation damage at various well inclinations were examined. The cluster structure of aggregated particles were determined using fractal theory and applying dynamic light... 

In this paper a nonlinear dynamic model for drill string in inclined well drilling is developed. Effects of drilling mud flow rate, weight on bit, angular velocity along with viscous damping on stability and vibration of the drill string are studied. Findings indicate the nonlinear effects are significant on the results. The effects of drilling mud flow rate and weight on bit on the natural frequencies and time responses are evaluated. Enhancement of drilling mud flow rate results in decreasing of natural frequencies and vibrational amplitude, while increasing the weight on bit, leads to decrease of the natural frequencies and increase the vibrational amplitude. © JVE INTERNATIONAL LTD  

In recent years, improving oil recovery (IOR) has become an important subject for the petroleum industry. One IOR method is infill drilling, which improves hydrocarbon recovery from virgin zones of the reservoir. Determining the appropriate location for the infill wells is very challenging and greatly depends on different factors such as the reservoir heterogeneity. This study aims to investigate the effect of reservoir heterogeneity on the location of infill well. In order to characterize the effect of heterogeneity on infill well locations, some geostatistical methods, e.g., sequential gaussian simulation, have been applied to generate various heterogeneity models. In particular, different... 

The particle shape is an important factor playing critical role in evaluation of the interactions between particles in high-concentration particle-fluid flows. In this paper, the well-known multisphere (MS) approximation approach and the novel rolling resistance approach are utilized to examine their performance in order to simplify the generalized shaped particle’s interactions within the framework of discrete element method (DEM) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The performance of two approaches are compared with the perfect particle’s shape geometry, for the limited cases of cubic-shaped and disk-shaped particle flows in a horizontal well drilling process as a reference scenario.... 

We investigate the effect of particle shape on the transportation mechanism in well-drilling using a three-dimensional model that couples computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with the discrete element method (DEM). This numerical method allows us to incorporate the fluid-particle interactions (drag force, contact force, Saffman lift force, Magnus lift force, buoyancy force) using momentum exchange and the non-Newtonian behavior of the fluid. The interactions of particle-particle, particle-wall, and particle-drill pipe are taken into account with the Hertz-Mindlin model. We compare the transport of spheres with non-spherical particles (non-smooth sphere, disc, and cubic) constructed via the... 

There are several types of drilling methods to increase the productivity of a well, such as horizontal drilling, extended reach horizontal drilling and Multilateral (ML) drilling. It is thought that ML wells could be more economic with higher productivities than horizontal or extended reach horizontal wells. Advances in ML drilling promise reduced costs, greater flexibility and increased profit potential. In the last 20 years, thousands of ML wells have been drilled worldwide, but only a small percentage of the total number of wells is multilateral. The probable reason may be lack of concise information and misconceptions surrounding the costs and perceived risks. However, recent advances in... 

In drilling oil wells a system of complex fluids and chemical additives is used. Losses of these fluids in the well during drilling or disposal of them in well site could transfer pollutants to groundwater. In the present study a number of well sites, located in South of Iran, were studied to indicate types and magnitude of various pollutant materials that remain in the environment undestroyed and have considerable impacts on the underground water resources. Hydrocarbons used in Oil Base Muds (OBM) that can't be biodegrade readily in nature found to be the most severe pollutant material caused by disposal of Drilling Mud and Cuttings. Volume of drilling waste for these oil wells evaluated to... 

Application of the colloidal gas aphrons (CGAs) in minimizing formation damage by plugging pore mechanism is now wildly accepted due to numerous successful field experience. One of the pivotal factors which affects the pore blockage ability of micro-bubbles is their stability. This experimental study tries to investigate the possible synergistic effect of nanoparticles on improving the stability and other properties of non-aqueous CGA drilling fluids, in both bulk and porous media. In particular, two types of hydrophobic nanoparticles including silicon dioxide nanopowder coated with 2 wt% Silane and nanoclay, in presence of a treated version of bentonite (Bentone 34) as a stabilizer and...