Abstract
Sand production has caused many serious problems in weakly consolidated reservoirs. Therefore, it is very urgent to find out the mechanism for this process. This paper employs a coupled lattice Boltzmann method and discrete element method (LBM-DEM) to study the sand production process of the porous media. Simulation of the sand production process is conducted and the force chain network evolvement is analyzed. Absolute and relative permeability changes before and after the sand production process are studied. The effect of injection flow rate, cementation strength, and confining pressure are investigated. During the simulation, strong force chain rupture and force chain reorganization can be identified. The mean shortest-path distance of the porous media reduces gradually after an initial sharp decrease while the mean degree and clustering coefficient increase in the same way. Furthermore, the degree of preferential wettability for water increases after the sand production process. Moreover, a critical flow rate below which porous media can reach a steady state exists. Results also show that porous media under higher confining pressure will be more stable due to the higher friction resistance between particles to prevent sand production.
Highlights
Sand production is one of the common problems in the oil field during the production process, especially in weakly consolidated or unconsolidated sandstone reservoirs
The stress and pore pressure near the perforation cavity would be redistributed and the rock would change from an equilibrium state to another after the perforation process
The initial and the final structure of the porous section, we present the analysis of absolute and relative mediaIninthis the sand production simulation was employed in thepermeability relative permeability calcu- perme abilityDifferent of the porous media
Summary
Sand production is one of the common problems in the oil field during the production process, especially in weakly consolidated or unconsolidated sandstone reservoirs. The stress and pore pressure near the perforation cavity would be redistributed and the rock would change from an equilibrium state to another after the perforation process. The stress state around the perforation cavities region changed due to the considerable force exerted on the rock by the fluid as the fluids flow into the wellbore. Rock failure will occur in the weakly consolidated or unconsolidated reservoir . In this condition, sand particles will be produced along with the reservoir fluids, which lead to the evolution of perforation cavities and deteriorate the formation condition. A lot of money was spent to deal with problems including borehole instability, casing collapse, and well cleaning
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