Drilling equipment erosion

Abstract

Erosion is a major problem in the oil and gas industry. The primary focus within the industry has been within oil and gas production as erosion is a limiting factor for production rates, and therefore heavily economically incentivized. The issue is seeing increased importance within the drilling industry as well, as more complex fluid systems are becoming more common as the drilling operation is pushed to larger depths and narrower margins.

Computational fluid dynamics together with particle tracking, the so called Eulerian-Lagrangian, method has seen increased use to forecast erosional behaviour within different flow geometries. This thesis covers the theoretical foundation for such erosional forecasting, as well as applying it with the to a relief well injection spool (RWIS), using COMSOLs Multiphysics program and DNVs erosion model.

Due to computational limitations, sufficiently high particle numbers where not achieved in these simulations and the results are therefore unreliable. Some erosional patterns did emerge, which could serve as indication of the erosional behaviour within the RWIS in future work.