Effect of Near Wall Turbulence on the Particle Removal From Bed Deposits in Horizontal Wells

Abstract

Although solids entrainment and deposition mechanisms have been studied extensively over the years, our understanding of fluids-particle interactions near bed interface is still limited. Progress toward such understanding has been relatively slow because of the difficulties inherent simultaneous measurement of local solids transport and adjacent near-bed fluid flow. With the introduction of non-intrusive measurement techniques such as Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV), it is now possible to determine the instantaneous velocity field and observe particle deposition/resuspension simultaneously under non-uniform flow conditions. An experimental program was conducted to investigate different aspects of turbulent flow of water over the cuttings bed deposited in horizontal annuli. A large-scale horizontal flow loop consisting of 9 m long high quality optic glass pipes (95 mm ID of outer pipe and 38 mm OD of inner pipe) equipped with state of the art PIV system has been used for the experiments. Turbulent flow over cuttings bed experiments were conducted at superficial Reynolds numbers of 9300 and 10800. Natural irregular shaped quartz sands with 3 different mean sieve sizes of 260, 350 and 600 micron were used as solid particles. The proposed work was accomplished through several tasks: i-) conduct experiments to measure the instantaneous local velocity profile during turbulent flow in the horizontal concentric annuli and examine the effect of stationary cutting bed on the local velocity profile, Reynolds stress and turbulence intensity; ii-) investigate the impact of particle size on the near-wall turbulent activities. Results have indicated that existence of a cuttings bed on the lower side of the wellbore dramatically alters the near wall velocity profile comparing to the case with no cuttings bed. Presence of cuttings bed causes the maximum velocity to shift toward the inner pipe. Presence of stationary cutting bed causes a reduction in Reynolds stress, axial and radial turbulence intensity, which in turn, would adversely affect the hole cleaning. Larger cuttings slightly enhanced turbulent stress and radial intensities. However, the increase in these entities as a result of increasing cutting size was far less than the decrease in them as a consequence of presence of stationary cutting bed. Axial turbulence intensity was the same in the core flow away from the cuttings bed for flow with and without a cuttings bed. However, the peak of axial intensities is shown to be less for flow near the cuttings bed.