A combined CFD-experimental study of erosion wear life prediction for non-Newtonian viscous slurries

Abstract

Solid particle erosion is one of the key issues affecting operational reliability and cost of tools and equipment in the oil and gas industry. Solid particles are typically either entrained in the fluid stream as a part of the unfiltered solids during drilling and production operations or are intentionally added to the fluid and transported into the formation during hydraulic fracturing.Erosion rates of optimized and suboptimal equipment designs can differ by several orders of magnitude. Recent developments in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) have led to the development of methodologies enabling accurate erosion wear life prediction. The study includes an overview of best practices in erosion prediction and shows practical examples of their application based on experimental studies of viscous slurry erosion in a direct impingement jet. Additionally, a Cross rheological model is used to model the non-Newtonian behavior of the fluid from the experimental program. The results show that the Cross model predicts a shear-thinning behavior; thus, erosion prediction with this rheological model agreed better with data than a Newtonian model.