Study on mud discharge after emergency disconnection of deepwater drilling risers

Abstract

Mud is often discharged into seawater after emergency disconnection of risers in offshore oil and gas drilling engineering. The discharged mud needs to be simulated accurately since it can produce a huge load on risers. Several mud discharge models have been proposed, such as Young's slug model, SFM model, WFC model and one-dimensional finite volume model. However, the mud is taken as a one-dimensional rigid body in existing mud discharge models. As a consequence, the radial velocity of mud, the mixing interface between mud and seawater, and mud discharge in complicated riser flow channels cannot be simulated. In this paper, a more accurate and applicable three-dimensional (3D) computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model is established to simulate the mud discharge process. The proposed method is demonstrated by its application to a case. It turns out that the actual mud discharge process can be simulated based on the 3D CFD model. Characteristics of the mud discharge including the radial velocity, axial velocity and the interface between two fluids are calculated based on the 3D CFD model, which improves the understanding of the mud discharge. Besides, the applicability of each mud discharge model is determined through model comparison. The influence of key factors including drill pipes with pipe joints, riser inner diameter, mud density and mud dynamic viscosity on the mud discharge is also analyzed based on the 3D CFD model.