CFD Study of Cuttings Transport through Vertical Wellbore

Abstract

Cuttings transportation from the bit up the annulus to the surface is one the essentialfunctions that are performed by drilling fluid. Predication of drilling fluid efficiency totransport cuttings in the annulus is very complicated due to numerous parameters that haveaffected drilling operations. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is widely used as anumerical technique in handling complex multiphase flow problems in differentoperational conditions.The present work has taken the advancement of CFD to computationally analyse theinfluence of the effects of various parameters like drilling fluid rheology, flow rate, piperotation, cuttings density, shape, concentration and drilling fluid- cuttings particle couplingregimes on the cuttings transport in a vertical wellbore. The CFD simulation was carriedout by using transient solver of ANSYS-FLUENT CFD commercial code.The dense discrete phase model (DDPM) is suggested in this work to overcome themain shortcomings of Eulerian–Eulerian and CFD-DEM approaches in simulating drillingfluid-cuttings flow. Also, some of the experimental investigations were involved indetermining the fluid physical properties and essential input data to perform the CFDsimulations. Regarding the results validation and verification, well agreement has beenachieved between results obtained in this study with those reported in other studies